All of these scenarios imply that the business and political environment will be the same post-covid as before. We still don’t know anything about the recovery horizon yet. There are lots of hopeful stories about possible vaccines, possible treatments etc, but nothing that you can hang your hat on.
During the recovery there will be a glut of cheap airframes, and still cheapish fuel, but perhaps the revenue side of the equation will be diminished. I winder if there will be many backers left willing to invest in airlines when there will be many more obvious bargains to be had in other industries.
Here's a mostly rhetorical question: why would a government facing a crippling debt allow foreign airlines, or really any corporations, to operate carte blanche within its borders? Would it not make more sense to insist that employees and head offices are locally based and locally taxed? Or at least taxed on the portion of their assessed profits earned locally? Protectionism may be necessary for a decade or so to restore the world to an even keel. It seems from down here in the cheap seats that globalisation as a strategy is going to get some serious re-thinking.
I am (reluctantly) reading opinions in the conservative media suggesting that the economy (profits) are more important than the death toll. Apparently serious people in the UK and the US are advocating this, although mostly in media affiliated with the Murdoch press. Why do you think that the very wealthy are afraid of pandemics? Its because afterward the door will be wide open for a new politics that focuses more on the commonwealth than the very few very wealthy. That is how revolutions happen, and apple carts get upset. We seem to be a long way from that today, but who knows where this road ends?