Airline industry braces for prolonged recovery from coronavirus crisis

Carriers including United Airlines Holdings Inc and Air New Zealand Ltd have warned they are likely to emerge from the crisis smaller, and there are fears others may not survive.

International seat capacity has dropped by almost 80% from a year ago and half the world's airplanes are in storage, new data shows, suggesting the aviation industry may take years to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

Carriers including United Airlines Holdings Inc and Air New Zealand Ltd have warned they are likely to emerge from the crisis smaller, and there are fears others may not survive.

"It is likely that when we get across to the other side of the pandemic, things won't return to the vibrant market conditions we had at the start of the year," said Olivier Ponti, vice president at data firm ForwardKeys.

"It's also possible that a number of airlines will have gone bust and uneconomic discounts will be necessary to attract demand back," he said in a statement.

ForwardKeys said the number of international airline seats had fallen to 10 million in the week of March 30 to April 5, down from 44.2 million a year ago.

Data firm OAG said several years of industry growth had been lost and it could take until 2022 or 2023 before the volume of flyers returns to the levels that had been expected for 2020.

Cirium, another aviation data provider, said around half of the world's airplane fleet was now in storage.

"While many of these will be temporary storage, many of these aircraft will never resume service," Cowen analyst Helane Becker said in a note to clients. "We believe the airline industry will look very different when we get to the other side of this."