Quantifying the Resilience of the U.S. Domestic Aviation Network During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on the United States air transportation network between March and August 2020. Despite dramatic reductions in flight and passenger volumes, the network remained robust and resilient against perturbation. Although 24% of airports closed, the reduction in network efficiency was only 5.1%, which means airlines continued to serve most destinations. A deeper analysis of airport closures reveals that 1) small peripheral airports were the most likely to be closed; 2) socio-economic and epidemiological factors characterizing the airport’s region such as income, income inequality, political leaning, and the number of observed COVID cases were not predictive of airport closure. Finally, we show that high network robustness has a downside: although emissions from United States air traffic in 2020 fell by 37.4% compared to 2019, mostly due to the drop in the number of flights, emissions per passenger doubled in the period April to August 2020 and increased eightfold in the week of April 5–11. This rise indicates inefficient use of resources by airlines.

The impact of COVID-19 on air passenger demand and CO2 emissions in Brazil

“…Based on these counterfactual estimates, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a drop of 63% (95% CI: -67%, -60%) in daily CO2 emissions, from 24.7 to 9.1thousand tonnes per day between March 15 and December 31st (figure 2C). Comparatively, this is a much higher impact than the 37.4% drop observed in the US domestic aviation market (Bauranov et al 2021). During this period, the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil avoided a total of 4.6 (95% CI: -4.8, -4.4) MMT of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere, an amount equivalent to one year of CO2 emissions from all domestic flights in France (Graver et al, 2019).…”

“…Because the Tier 1 method adopted in this paper relies on reported information on fuel consumption, it can give more accurate emission estimates than the methods used in previous studies (Graver et al, 2019;Bauranov et al, 2021). The total fuel consumption, reported for each flight, is a result of a combination of factors such as trip distances, landing/take-off (LTO) and climb/cruise/descent (CCD) times, aircraft and engine categories, load, and total passengers.…”

“…The total fuel consumption, reported for each flight, is a result of a combination of factors such as trip distances, landing/take-off (LTO) and climb/cruise/descent (CCD) times, aircraft and engine categories, load, and total passengers. The use of aviation kerosene consumption information generates more accurate results compared to aircraft performance models, which tend to underestimate fuel consumption and often require validation of results and correction factors (Graver et al, 2019;Bauranov et al, 2021). The methodological approach of this paper also allows for more robust results compared to other studies that estimate emissions based on OAG Global flight numbers (Graver et al, 2019;Le Quéré et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2020) or that assumes a constant emission factor per km flown across the whole fleet of aircraft (Liu et al, 2020) or by aircraft type (Bauranov et al, 2021).…”

“…By the time of the publication of those studies, there were great uncertainties about how the pandemic would unfold and about how the aviation sector would recover until the end of 2020. One study analyzed data for the entire year of 2020 (Bauranov et al, 2021), but it focused specifically on the United States. The authors found that CO2 emissions produced by the US domestic air traffic dropped by 37.4% in 2020 compared to 2019 (Bauranov et al, 2021).…”

“…One study analyzed data for the entire year of 2020 (Bauranov et al, 2021), but it focused specifically on the United States. The authors found that CO2 emissions produced by the US domestic air traffic dropped by 37.4% in 2020 compared to 2019 (Bauranov et al, 2021).…”