$399b hit: Unprecedented decline in passenger traffic, says ICAO report

Airlines could face worse-than-expected losses this year due to the coronavirus crisis, latest industry data show, even as many parts of the world are seeing a "second wave" of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ICAO, in a report out on Thursday, projected international and domestic aviation could take up to a $399b hit, in terms of gross passenger revenue for Q1 alone. That is much higher than the initial estimated losses of $314b the industry group IATA projected in April 2010 for the global aviation industry, as IATA had projected a “3-month lockdown + recession” then. For an indication of how civil aviation has been hit hard by the virus, Flight Radar reported tracking 11,000 flights on Sunday, October 5, 2020 on https://flightradar24.com. That's a huge drop from 230,000 flights cruising through the sky all around the globe on July 25, 2019 (aviation’s busiest day in history). And that's still a nine-fold reduction compared to the 102,465 average number of flights a day worldwide recorded in 2019.<br/>