What Will Air Travel Look Like After the Pandemic?
America is grounded on account of the COVID-19 pandemic. Photos of thousands of airliners crammed onto unused runways and any available tarmac space take place in our national lockdown’s gallery of eerie images. Domestic passenger traffic numbers are down about 95 percent from a year earlier. Airlines have canceled most flights as they lose tens of millions of dollars a day, and there is little indication that demand for air travel will pick up anytime soon. The federal government did step in to provide the industry with $25 billion in emergency grants and loans to preserve the nation’s circulatory system and prevent a total collapse — aid conditioned upon the airlines continuing to serve all their domestic markets and avoiding any layoffs until September.
