Although passenger airlines operate cargo or evacuation flights, the volume of such traffic is incomparably lower than before the COVID crisis. According to Flightradar, which tracks aircraft movements, the number of flights worldwide has dropped from 176,000 to 67,000 per day (if we compare early March and mid-April 2020). The size of the airlines’ workload has decreased significantly, so many of them had to cut employees.

In particular, the Hungarian low-cost carrier Wizz Air announced that it would lay off 1,000 employees – nearly one in five workers of the company. The decision was taken due to the fact that the airline uses only 3% of its operating capacity, which was before the COVID-19 pandemic. Continue reading →