Originally Posted by
TURIN
I remember that sort of nonsense being bandied about after 911 and again after the financial crisis.
Yes, there will be a reset, but you are talking about the entire civil aviation business going to the wall. Airports, manufacturing and everything that it supports.
Not going to happen.
I think it will take longer for things to get back to normal than it did post 9/11,
I would assume that business travel will rebound fairly quickly but the holiday/leisure market will take quite a bit longer. There's just not going to be enough spare cash in the pot for the likes of Barry and Sharon to go and soak up the Spanish culture at the Red Lion in Benidorm for a week or two.
The first companies to feel this will probably be those providing ACMI services such as Smartlynx, HiFly, Air Belgium etc. Up till now due to the problems with the B737 MAX and the B787 they've been doing well but this will have come to an end.
On the maintenance side, we're only working on cargo aircraft at the moment but things will get better, in fact we generally get busier if an airline goes bankrupt, someone has to do the bridging checks before the aircraft go to a new operator, that's assuming that there will be new operators !
As for a government bail out, there's no easy answer, how many airlines are 100% owned in one country ? Not many, so it would be very difficult to allocate the funds where they're needed.
However, the infrastructure needs to be kept in place so I don't see any problem assisting airports, ground handling services etc.