COVID-19’s impact on the global aviation sector
There’s no sugarcoating the diagnosis: airlines are the biggest destroyer of value among all aviation subsectors. McKinsey’s analysis of the aviation value chain in 2020—our latest—paints a grim picture. All subsectors save freight forwarders and cargo airlines suffered huge losses (Exhibit 1).
Of course, this is expected. The COVID-19 pandemic is entering its endemic stages in some parts of the world at the time of writing, and airlines hemorrhaged $168 billion in economic losses in 2020. Although the temptation is to pin the blame solely on the pandemic-induced plunge in passenger traffic, that would be to ignore the airline industry’s underlying and long-term health problems.
This article, the first in a two-part…
