The Impact of COVID-19 on Flight Networks

Abstract

As COVID-19 transmissions spread worldwide, governments have announced and enforced travel restrictions to prevent further infections. Such restrictions have a direct effect on the volume of international flights among these countries, resulting in extensive social and economic costs. To better understand the situation in a quantitative manner, we analyzed the OpenSky Network data to clarify flight patterns and flight densities around the world. Then we observed relationships between flight numbers with new infection cases and the economy (the unemployment rate) in Barcelona. We found that the number of daily flights gradually decreased and then suddenly dropped 64% during the second half of March in 2020 after the United States and Europe enacted travel restrictions. We also observed a 51% decrease in the global flight network density decreased during this period. Regarding new COVID-19 cases, the United States had an unexpected surge regardless of travel restrictions. Finally, the layoffs for temporary workers in the tourism and airplane business increased by 4.3 fold in the weeks following Spain's decision to close its borders.

An absorptive capacity-based systems view of Covid-19 in the small business economy

“…The worse effects are most evident in the service-related industries, in which a large share belongs to small and medium size enterprises (SMEs).Examples include the near-instant collapse in demand for inbound travel and leisure services such as hotel rooms, and tourist attractions such as museums and theme parks (Ozili & Arun, 2020). Popular destinations in the United States experienced up to 90% shrinkage in inbound traffic in the first two weeks of the March 2020 lockdown order, hitting airline seats, hotel rooms, and restaurant covers (Suzumura et al, 2020). Airlines around the world parked between 50-90% of available seat capacity, predicting that a return to full operating capacity could be years away due to continuing border control measures (Sun et al, 2020).…”

The effects of COVID-19 on Andalusian tourism and aviation sector

“…Some countries restricted the flights from severely affected areas while others even canceled almost all flights. These travel restrictions did delay or interrupt the further transmission of the COVID-19 (Chinazzi et al , 2020) but also caused great damage to the world airline network (Suzumura et al , 2020), the most important travel network in today’s world and one of the key infrastructures of today’s global economy. Ye et al (2020) suggest that the impact on the world airline network connectivity of an airline company failure depends on its coupling with other companies.…”

“…As we write, COVID-19 is still very much with us so the analysis provided here draws on a range of scientist journals (Baum and Hai, 2020) and secondary sources, which can be formally verified at this time. The literature relation to the COVID-19 pandemic is being extended and this is focused on aviation and tourism sectors (Abraham et al , 2020; Albers and Rundshagen, 2020; Bock et al , 2020; Budd et al , 2021; Chinazzi et al , 2020; Henríquez et al , 2020; Maneenop and Kotcharin, 2020; Melly and Hanrahan, 2020; Mustapha et al , 2020; Nakamura and Managi, 2020; Serrano and Kazda, 2020; Sharun et al , 2020; Suzumura et al , 2020; Uğur et al , 2020; Wen et al , 2020; Wenzel et al , 2020; Winston, 2020; Ye et al , 2020, etc.). The literature shows the link between airports and airlines to attract passengers to the tourist destination.…”

Visualising the COVID-19 related disruptions to long-distance population mobility in Australia

“…We use aviation statistics as a proxy for long-distance human mobility. Several papers have already been written on COVID-19 impacted mobility using flight data (e.g., Iacus et al 2020;Garcia-Gasulla et al 2020;Lau et al 2020;Suzumura et al 2020). Our contribution focuses on the Australian context, providing a summary visual representation of the huge changes in both domestic and international mobility trends which have occurred recently.…”