Meeting The Unexpected: The Very Sensitive Behaviour Of The Air Transport Sector During The Covid-19 Pandemic And The Lessons Learnt

From a ‘future states’ typology perspective (Stimson et al., 2006), the COVID-19 pandemic can be placed between unpredictable and chaotic future. Most of the forecasting models did not even take into consideration the risks of a pandemic outbreak, making their predictions useless and exposing the corresponding social-economic activities to huge perturbations, with low chances of fast recovery. When confronted with this situation, the academic environment reacted with a plethora of research studies in various affected fields. However, many of them addressed specific, narrow aspects, lacking the integrative frameworks, able to offer all-embracing views of investigated phenomena, from the forms of manifestation to in-depth, multi-sided evaluations as well as strategies and policy measures to face the entailed challenges. This paper aims to join those studies which have sought to fill this gap, proposing a comprehensive perspective on one of the most severely hit sectors by the COVID-19 pandemic, namely the air transportation. The emphasis is placed on the better understanding of the very sensitive behaviour of this sector when confronted with a pandemic crisis, as a way of increasing the preparedness to react and, consequently, to diminish the severity of negative effects. As a general note, the paper supports the orientation towards holistic, resilience/prosilience-based approaches instead of returning to the old routines, described by ‘business as usual’ syntagma.