COVID-19 pandemic and air transportation: Summary of Recent Research, Policy Consideration and Future Research Directions

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic can be considered an unparalleled disruption to the aviation industry in the last century. Starting with an at-that-time inconceivable reduction in the number of flights from March 2020 to May 2020, the aviation industry has been trying to navigate through and out of the crisis. This process is accompanied with a significant number of scientific studies, reporting on the direct and indirect impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on aviation and vice versa. This paper reviews the impacts in context of the recent literature. We have collected nearly 200 well-published papers on the subject in the years 2021/2022 and dissected them into a framework of eight categories, built around: airlines, airports, passengers, workforce, markets, contagion, sustainability, and economics. We highlight the essence of findings in the literature and derive a set of future research directions and policy considerations which we deem important on the way towards pandemic-resilient aviation.

Keywords: Air transportation; COVID-19; Literature review; Pandemics.

Fig. 1

The unique impact of COVID-19 on aviation in context of earlier crises in terms of the number of transported passengers worldwide (data source: International Air Transport Association, IATA).

Fig. 2

Categorization of the scientific literature regarding the interactions between air transportation and the COVID-19 pan- demic.

Fig. 3

Preferred intervention measures by passengers to revive safe air transportation, collected from Budd et al. (2021).

Fig. 4

Temporal evolution of the passenger numbers for the top-20 largest aviation markets between 2019 and 2022. The horizontal dashed line shows the maximum number of passengers as reference (data source: Sabre Market Intelligence).

Fig. 5

Overview on future policy needs and research challenges towards pandemic-resilient aviation.