COVID-19 and Aviation

Abstract

The crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has undeniably affected many aspects of life from conveniences of everyday living to global economic repercussions. Due to the widespread mandated lockdowns early in the pandemic, the economy inevitably suffered greatly as evidenced by the stock market’s unpredictability (6) and the 1.8 trillion USD in bailouts to private sectors from the US government. (18) The pandemic imposes a significant strain on several aspects of life as we know it, but the substantial effects on the travel industry, with particular focus on the aviation industry, will be the focus of this paper. This paper discusses various challenges such as the overall effect on the airlines due to the considerable decrease in the revenue of airlines, effect on global cargo transportation, the airworthiness of the aircraft, the profound impact the pilots face concerning the maintenance of their medical certificate and flying currencies, the effects on the pilot’s mental health, public health challenges and various considerations for airlines moving forward. Despite these repercussions on the aviation industry due to the mandated shutdowns, the aviation industry had its challenges even before the COVID-19 pandemic. This literature review was conducted via search engines such as Google, Google Scholar, and PubMed with search keywords including “coronavirus, pandemic, aviation industry, lockdown, and airlines”.

Distinguishing the Job Market Across Aerospace and Aviation: A Natural Language Processing Approach

“…When discussing the human capital requirements as it relates to the aerospace or aviation sectors, often the conversation will focus on the workforce demand of 'pilots' and 'mechanics' (Caraway, 2020;Crouch, 2020;Lutte, 2018). While there has been a lowered demand for pilots and mechanics in the aviation sector workforce pipeline prior to COVID-19 (Bidaisee, 2021), this lowered demand for other skills was not exhibited across both the aerospace and aviation sectors. Systems thinking and systems-based skillsets dominated the data conversation within this research.…”

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“…When discussing the human capital requirements as it relates to the aerospace or aviation sectors, often the conversation will focus on the workforce demand of 'pilots' and 'mechanics' (Caraway, 2020;Crouch, 2020;Lutte, 2018). While there has been a lowered demand for pilots and mechanics in the aviation sector workforce pipeline prior to COVID-19 (Bidaisee, 2021), this lowered demand for other skills was not exhibited across both the aerospace and aviation sectors. Systems thinking and systems-based skillsets dominated the data conversation within this research.…”

Air transportation and COVID-19: A tale with three episodes

“…Sun et al [51] collected more than 110 papers on aviation and COVID-19 published in 2020, analyzing global air transport system, impacts on passenger- centric flight experience and long-term impacts on aviation. Bidaisee [6] discussed impacts of the pandemic on aviation and various challenges, e.g., airlines, cargo transportation, aircraft and pilots. Khatib et al [28] reviewed literature on air travel safety during the pandemic, with recurring themes including the role of passenger travel in geographic spread of COVID-19, in-flight transmission risk, effectiveness of travel controls and flight-related prevention, and challenges of vaccine passports.…”