PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Career advice for Pilots..
View Single Post
Old 28th Mar 2020, 10:13
  #57 (permalink)  
GS-Alpha
 
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: UK
Posts: 727
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
If this virus completely went away tomorrow, what position would the global economy and airlines be in? If no lock downs or government economic intervention or virus spread suppression occurred, and no vaccine was ever found, what position would the global economy or airlines be in? Neither of these two extremes are likely to happen, but how close to either extreme is history going to record? Nobody knows! We can either be pessimistic for the future, or we can be optimistic. I knew back in January that we would arrive at the position we see ourselves in today, because whilst I saw China doing an amazing job, the rest of the world was not taking the situation seriously enough. Most people I spoke to, thought I was being incredibly pessimistic, but I was just being a realist. (I bet the world’s leaders are wishing they had immediately shut down all travel out of China and had traced and tested every individual who had travelled out the previous month; a massive undertaking which complacency at the time, deemed to be an over the top reaction. Now look where we are? I doubt they will make that mistake again).

However, I am optimistic that we can control this pandemic to quite a large extent, even before a vaccine comes along. Antigen and antibody testing does not require anything like the testing of vaccines, and as they soon become readily available, they will be very important tools to help us suppress the spread of the virus. The need to recover the economy ASAP is leading to a lot of money being being thrown at research and innovation to combat the effects of this virus, (and that learning will also be incredibly useful for the inevitable next virus to come along).

So whilst I agree this pandemic does have the potential to become the aviation game-changer being suggested here, (and I believe things are going to get a lot worse over the next month and lead to far more popular belief that this will indeed be the case), I am confident that the science will rapidly evolve, enabling us to move further away from the disastrous end of the spectrum of possibilities, and much closer to the more optimistic end. The possibilities for the economy follow a similar spectrum. The governments of the world are giving the science more time by pumping large amounts of money into the economy. The overall outcome will depend on how much time the science requires. That is pure guesswork at the moment, but I for one am choosing to remain optimistic.
GS-Alpha is offline