Assessing the Global COVID-19 Impact on Air Transport with Open Data

The COVID19 pandemic shifted the focus and attention of political decision-makers and strategic planers over the past years. There is an emerging need to address the local and regional differences of the impact of policies and demonstrate to airspace users and the travelling public how the air transportation system responds to such large-scale events. This paper approaches the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as a massive air service disruption of the pre-pandemic global connectivity and regional air transport networks. A resilience based approach is followed to identify and quantify the impact levels. For this initial application the parameters have been chosen in accordance with the operational experience of the authors. This paper applies a data driven approach and uses open and crowd-collected data to assess the impact of COVID-19. This included data preparatory action to augment the ADSB based data set with other publicly available data sources to provide a basis for the analysis of three major regional air transport networks. The analytical results were obtained for the United States, Europe, and Brazil for the pandemic period 2020 and the first half of 2021. The year 2019 is used for reference purposes and to establish a baseline for the impact evaluation. The analysis of the developments in Brazil, Europe, and the United States showed similarities but also stark differences in terms of the response to curb the spread of COVID-19 and associated travel policies. The results obtained demonstrate the feasibility to address global air transport problems with open and crowd sourced data. Future work to harmonize the open data collection and utility can provide a basis for a more open and transparent management of air transportation crisis response, evaluation, or strategic planning. The initial approach to address resilience can further inform the on-going work of the ICAO performance expert group under the Global Air Navigation Plan.