مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد ترافیک هوایی در شیوع کروناویروس – الزویر 2020

Due to the coronavirus global crisis, most countries have put in place restrictive measures in order to confine the pandemia and contain the number of casualties. Among the restrictive measures, air traffic suspension is certainly quite effective in reducing the mobility on the global scale in the short term but it also has high socioeconomic impact on the long and short term. The main focus of this study is to collect and prepare data on air passengers traffic worldwide with the scope of analyze the impact of travel ban on the aviation sector. Based on historical data from January 2010 till October 2019, a forecasting model is implemented in order to set a reference baseline. Making use of airplane movements extracted from online flight tracking platforms and online booking systems, this study presents also a first assessment of recent changes in flight activity around the world as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. To study the effects of air travel ban on aviation and in turn its socio-economic, several scenarios are constructed based on past pandemic crisis and the observed flight volumes. It turns out that, according to these hypothetical scenarios, in the first Quarter of 2020 the impact of aviation losses could have negatively reduced World GDP by 0.02% to 0.12% according to the observed data and, in the worst case scenarios, at the end of 2020 the loss could be as high as 1.41–1.67% and job losses may reach the value of 25–30 millions. Focusing on EU27, the GDP loss may amount to 1.66–1.98% by the end of 2020 and the number of job losses from 4.2 to 5 millions in the worst case scenarios. Some countries will be more affected than others in the short run and most European airlines companies will suffer from the travel ban. We hope that these preliminary results may be of help for informed policy making design of exit strategies from this global crisis.

Introduction

The recent COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak and the relevant precautionary measures to limit its spreading are having clear impacts on human mobility at global scale. This provoked a reduction of domestic and international volumes of air passenger traffic to and from China in February (Iacus et al., 2020). Such effects are currently being observed in several regions worldwide. This has clear implications for the aviation industry as well as indirect consequences to several sectors (e.g. tourism) and the economy at large as well as the society. Through the use of historical air traffic data, real time flights tracks and on-line booking systems, this works aims to provide air traffic volume projections following a set of scenarios base on observed and previous crises. These range from a rapid and full recovery to less optimistic scenarios of slower or even incomplete recovery which will depend on the duration and intensity of the lock-down. The trend of mobility at global scale has been rising over the last decade at a pace that is faster than the global world population growth (Recchi et al., 2019). Nevertheless, air traffic flows have been shaped at national and regional scale by shocks due to political instability, terrorism and economic crises (Gabrielli et al., 2019).