Aviation world rethinking strategies after COVID-19 crises

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to trigger a global economic crisis of significant dimensions, affecting all industries and activity sectors. One of the industry sectors in the eye of the coronavirus storm is aerospace. As governments all over the world have closed the boarders and imposed quarantine to their citizens, global air traffic has been brought to an almost complete standstill by the COVID-19 outbreak. Aviation leaders all over the world think that “this is still the worst crisis that this industry has ever been faced with. There’s a huge amount of uncertainty going forward.” In Europe and all over the world, governments are taking action adopting measures in support of their national airlines, but besides the grounded planes and canceled flights, a whole aviation and aeronautics industry is suffering from this crises. The big manufacturing companies are suffering and have to let go thousands of employees. There is an enormous pressure also on the aviation research to cope with the new situation. The immediate impact of the crisis is a severe economic downturn of the whole industry, starting with airlines postponing or stopping orders and deliveries, creating a snowball effect on the complete value chain, with a drastic lack of cash to finance research projects. In this challenging times of unprecedented uncertainties, aeronautics research community is trying to answer to two pressing questions: (1) How does this crisis affect research in the European aviation sector? and (2) What needs to be done to face the consequences caused by COVID-19 and boost aviation research in Europe?