True. But it will be a buyers market. Cash and credit will be king. Sellers can chose to meet the market, or can decide not to sell.
And any airlines that have received generous government support will likely be expected to "do the right thing for the country" and encourage tourism.

Even in 2021, some people will be travelling. Even if holidays are not approved, some people will seek approval as family business (helping elderly relatives arrange affairs) or essential business travel or whatever.

“forever” is a long time. :rolleyes:

It's interesting how people are so quick to hijack the words "change" and "normal". The aviation industry is give or take a century old...wtf is "normal"? Low cost aviation has only been around 30 years. Concorde has been and gone in the last 50. Rich folk who own airlines are trying to make some form of space travel "normal". Hell, 40 years ago dolled up stewardesses in miniskirts were totally standard. You get my drift.

Of course commercial aviation will change, it was going to change anyway without Covid19, there are a myriad of factors - some known, some yet to be discovered - driving such change. How Covid19 will speed-up (or slow-down) such changes is yet to seen. Some are obvious in the short to medium term, some are more debatable, but to suggest that everything will swing back to "normal" is not just myopic in terms of Covid 19 - its requires a complete disregard of the history of the industry you all work in.

Change is part of life, and in aviation it has traditionally been swift, dramatic and far-reaching. The fact that airlines (and the support industries) have globally restructured already, entailing the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs whilst permanently retiring entire fleets of aircraft, is a little bit of a clue. The fact that the virus and all the various economic interventions are still in full swing whilst they speed ahead with these restructuring plans is an even bigger clue.

The aviation industry is continually changing and it will probably change further and faster as a result of Covid19. Whether it is good change or bad change depends entirely on personal circumstance and values. And there is no normal in this industry...there never has been and there never will.

I can state as an IT Professional that video conferencing in various flavours has existed for more than 15 years, Zoom itself is a reasonably mature product (current version is 5.x). It's interesting that COVID has been used as an excuse to reduce business travel when the alternative has been around for a very long time.

I have been using video conferencing for meetings for almost 30 years......and that's working for an airline! Remember, Napoleon had thoughts of digging a channel tunnel in the early 1800s.. Yep, some things just take time to catch on!

As an IT professional surely you know then that the technology is constantly evolving and getting better.

The laggy, pixulated Skype video conferencing of 5-10 years ago is no where near as good as what we have now, and it’s only going to get better.

You guys just don't get it, the guys predicting that zoom and the like will take over meetings. It won't, ever, permanently that is. It's like saying zoom will permanently replace family get togethers. It's used as a stopgap. I've been doing some classroom stuff via zoom and it sucks. It is not the same as face to face and never will be.

"We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan.

Maybe the third world NBN speeds that many of us ended up with even in major centres will be the saviour of business travel and a bunch of aviation jobs. Maybe there was a method to the FTTN madness?

The outfit I work for had a Cisco video conferencing suite set up in a board room back in the early naughties. It had it's own dedicated high bandwidth internet link and worked pretty sweetly, the downside being it cost mega $$$ to buy and maintain and you could only talk to sites which had links of sufficient bandwidth to carry the feed. The fact I can now video conference in high definition on my mobile phone over the cellular network astounds me and would not have been possible back in the days of GPRS/GSM/CDMA. Yes the times are a changin indeed...

Just a little perspective from the outside. I haven't stopped working since the pandemic started (thankfully!) and it would seem that albeit light, passenger demand is still there, especially in Business and First as those who can afford it, wish to socially distance the best they can on aluminium tube.

Re video conferencing, I have quite a few friends in executive level management in companies completely away from aviation. They don't see this way of doing business practical particularly when you're doing multi million dollar deals, you need to see their poker face. And in Asia, face to face business dealings are VERY culturally important. It's a bit hard to do a deal when the kids come barging into the home office or the family cat walks over the keyboard. Just look at the news outlets and when they do interviews via zoom and the like. The interviewee is struggling to hear the questions being asked because the equipment they use is quite inferior to what a studio can provide (or the feed just cuts all together because the kids are using up all the bandwidth on youtube!)

The very same doomsday predictions were made during the 9/11 attacks, the first SARS outbreak and the GFC. Yet aviation prevailed.

Fuel-Off :ok:

My contention isn’t that post pandemic business travel will evaporate completely. I believe, based on conversations with friends outside aviation who work in the public and private sectors, is that in some organisations, one in every 2 or 3 business trips could be replaced by video conferencing. Perhaps a 10-20-30% reduction overall. Not a doomsday prediction, but not a snap back to pre pandemic levels of business travel either.

What has happened after EVERY single aviation crisis?

The pax with little money stay home, those with some money travel, businesses reduce travel for the finanvial quarter. Then, those with little money stay home until fares are reduced to bargain basement, those with some money start earning their frequent flier points again, and businesses start enjoying the perks of travel again.

The cycle repeats, and life goes on....

I agree that videoconferencing will never completely replace face to face meetings. Business travel will still recover to levels similar to 2019 within time, as will leisure travel, as people physically want to travel and visit people and places and that is so ingrained within the public consciousness now it’ll never change.

The only real threat is the method of getting people there, so I see Australian aviation’s biggest long term threat not Zoom or another pandemic, it will be if Australia ever bothers to build a Brisbane-Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne High Speed Railway. London to Paris air traffic decreased 55%, Madrid to Barcelona 65% after the opening of those respective high speed railways. But that’ll probably take 20 years to eventuate one this country, so I wouldn’t be worrying about it just yet.

No one is saying high yield business pax will go to zero. But it doesn’t have to go to zero to severely damage an industry which depends on these high yield pax.

There will always be a need for some face to face - 1st meetings, major deals, dealing with problems will all require face to face. No argument.

but a lot of routine meetings will be streamed.

Agree with above that high yield business travel will severely decline. Those that can afford it will be more likely to charter or own corporate jets. Such will be the pain of mass air travel with additional layers of health checks on top of the already burdensome security nonsense, that many business people will find reason to NOT fly on the airlines.
Once we find a vaccine the Bogans-to-Bali market may well be the first to recover, because yobs will always want to travel to the cheapest destinations.
In Europe, because of their woeful climate, northern nations will look for cheap travel to sunnier destinations for their annual three week getaways. Hence the likes of Ryanair should do OK, but having flown with them once, I would rather walk or swim.

Given the amount of unemployed Pilots around the world, and the rate of recovery.... AND the stupendous knee jerk reaction to this virus (lock-downs etc) , the WHO f*ck up (Thanks China) and the complete F-Wits involved with "keeping us safe" and getting a lot wrong.... Aviation is doomed for a few years yet....
Only caveat to this is this is a USA election year, so I assume a lot of covid hype will be pushed continuously and not allowing any "positive" news about treatments to come out (especially non-patent ones). I expect a sudden change of heart from media after Nov 3rd depending on the outcome of the USA election.
Funny how the inventor of the PCR test says that the test is not meant to be used like it is for identifying cases! So many please explains!

Yeah we get it mate, #plandemic.....
It’s all a conspiracy by the deep state to stop Trump being re-elected. His drop in popularity has absolutely nothing to do with him claiming it would disappear by April or it was all a hoax or whatever.
But what would the “so called experts” know with all those qualifications and years of experience, they haven’t been exposed to the truth......

Funny how that entire sentence is total nonsense, nothing more than a debunked internet conspiracy meme.
Please explain where you get your information on subjects like that from?

May have already infected 500,000 Australians.

Given this was running through China by December, given it hit Europe by December, and given all the movement between China and Australia over summer (University holidays plus Chinese New Year), it would be miraculous if it wasn’t rampant in Australia by Jan and Feb.

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal...0200722-p55ec3

If this assumption is true I can only view it as a GOOD sign that we are already living with COVID-19 as a society. If a vaccine isn’t successful rest assured it won’t be the end of the world after all.

For the apparent free world. Maybe Maybe Not, nobody survives a third time infection