The ability of aviation to drive these global benefits came to a grinding halt earlier this year, when COVID-19 was ultimately identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Countries quickly and prudently closed their borders to contain the pandemic’s spread, and by April 2020 the number of people flying had plummeted by over 90 per cent. ICAO is now estimating a 60 per cent overall passenger decline this year, and close to half a trillion dollars in sectoral revenues lost. As of early November 2020, over half of the international routes once serviced by airlines and airports had been lost.
This trend will likely continue in the near-term, even as the promise of new testing solutions and vaccines begins to be realized. Anything in terms of meaningful recovery for the international air transport network will likely not take place until 2022, and a return to pre-COVID growth trends could take several more years after that.By severing our international connections by air in this manner, COVID-19 has cut off businesses from clients and tourists from destinations and posed disproportionate threats to the poor and vulnerable.Landlocked and small island nations have been especially hard hit by these effects, but in point of fact, the profound and cascading negative effects on transport, tourism, and many other areas of socioeconomic development are being felt in all countries, everywhere. Hundreds of millions of livelihoods have been placed in jeopardy as a result.
Public and private sector leaders also need to recognize that a world not connected by scheduled flights is a world where countries will face serious challenges to their short- and long-term needs for food supplies and medical products and equipment, and many other perishable and high-value goods. E-commerce activity, which is highly reliant on air cargo services, and which has been a beacon of economic growth during the pandemic period, would also become seriously and globally constrained.
These impacts, in addition to more job losses globally, would further reduce the tax bases of national planners—including with respect to decreased or abandoned investments in sustainable development.Also at risk would be our collective global capacity to reconnect the world once COVID-19 is finally behind us, and to lift it once again into broad-based and inclusive economic recovery. Since the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, ICAO has issued calls to States and the civil aviation industry to observe relevant global aviation standards and the WHO International Health Regulations, and we took quick action to address some immediate needs in terms of special alleviations to international standards in order to safely maintain essential air services.We also rapidly established a comprehensive set of proprietary pandemic monitoring platforms, tools and resources for both States and industry, and innovated a global airport real-time status app in response to requests from the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service, managed by the World Food Programme (WFP), and which proved essential to the successful coordination of the earliest COVID-19 humanitarian efforts. ICAO has spared no effort to provide guidance to make it possible for aviation to restart and recover, as well as targeted assistance to States in need under its No Country Left Behind (NCLB) initiative.The Regional Offices’ close and continuous coordination with their accredited States, and ICAO Headquarters, is currently helping improve the coordination between air transport and public health officials State-to-State and accelerate industry recovery where medically prudent.This crisis calls for globally and regionally harmonized, mutually accepted measures, and taken together, actions of ICAO have helped keep critical supply chains operating, expedited the repatriations of thousands of stranded citizens in every world region, maintained operations for necessary air crew and personnel, and maintained much needed humanitarian and emergency air service capacities.As bad as things have been for international aviation since COVID-19 struck, they could have been much worse. That’s because ICAO and WHO, together with States and key national and regional public health stakeholders, had already begun to consider and address pandemic risks to aviation long before this latest pandemic.
