Bartkus: The whole world is in four crises, in none of us do we see a light at the end of the tunnel

The sector has experienced several crises but has withstood them

At the Login conference, S. Bartkus said that 50-100 years ago, before the advent of aviation, the average person in the world traveled about 20 kilometers from their birthplace during their entire life. The appearance of airplanes has changed everything dramatically. People began to fly very fast and today aviation is a fast growing industry.

Passenger traffic has grown steadily since World War II, with the number of passengers in the world doubling every 15 years. According to him, over the past 30 years, the number of air passengers in Lithuania has grown even faster than in the rest of the world.

“We have been completely shut in for decades, the world has closed on us. We have parents who remember and romanticize that they used to fly from Vilnius to Kupiškis, to Biržai, to Palanga.

But we cannot compare our current life with what it was a few decades ago. In Lithuania, for the past 30 years, we have caught up and made up for the time we were locked up. If it weren’t for the coronavirus crisis, the question is how things would have gone, ”said the aviation expert.

The aviation sector, like all other sectors, has experienced crises in the past: the oil crisis, war, economic crisis, terrorist events and local pandemics. According to S. Bartkus, this crisis has not caused long-term disturbances so far.

2001 September 11 The terrorist attack in the United States is the only case in history in which the number of air passengers in the world has been decreasing for two years in a row. All other crises have been able to disrupt growth for up to a year.

“The question is, will it be the same now? There is a lot of truth in those words: an invisible and unprecedented crisis of unprecedented proportions. In the spring, the world came to a halt with great force. Airlines quickly ‘packed’ their planes and started to build them in airports. In a very short time, most of the industry represents about 80 percent. – It was suspended “, – teaches S. Bartkus.

The world is currently in four crises

He points out that aviation has suffered all kinds of crises and has survived them all. “In my opinion, what has not been seen is that currently four crises are going through at the same time. Each of them would be a great impact, and now we have four things at the same time ”, explains S. Bartkus why this impact is unprecedented.

The first crisis, as the rapporteur describes it, is the global COVID-19 pandemic. There have been before, but they were all local.

“If at first COVID-19 was compared to the Spanish flu in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. This pandemic could have been on par with COVID-10 Delphi), but there was no commercial aviation at the time, so it couldn’t be shaken. (…)

During the SARS pandemic, people avoided flying to Asian countries, but were able to change their vacation itineraries to another part of the world. The sector has not yet seen such a global pandemic ”, he concludes.

According to him, the world is also currently going through an economic crisis: “In Lithuania, we are showing quite good results, but many countries in the world are experiencing a major economic recession. It is often higher than the 2008 financial crisis. This crisis alone would be a huge shock to the transport sector.
To date, the change in passenger flows is theoretically calculated to double the change in gross domestic product (GDP). If the country’s GDP grows 3%, passenger traffic can be expected to increase 6%. However, the opposite also happened: if the economy falls 3%, passenger traffic falls 6% “.

The third crisis is confidence and uncertainty that is said to affect the heads of all people who are willing and able to travel.

We also contribute to this by intimidating ourselves with social media and the media. We have a lot of uncertainty and uncertainty that makes traveling a great risk for us.

Not only that, people who currently travel often avoid uploading photos to the social networks they travel to. We can receive condemnation from friends because we are traveling. In Sweden, people have been embarrassed to travel by choosing air travel. Now it has become 10 times stronger: people are ashamed of people who travel because they supposedly contribute to the spread of the virus around the world, ”says S. Bartkus.

The fourth global crisis is the collapse of international relations or the policy of closing borders.

“In the last decades, we have seen a liberating world, more and more places where we could travel without a visa, operating in a Schengen world and other areas, where nobody checks documents and asks why we travel.

We have seen that, with the impact, all international relations collapsed very quickly. We saw this clearly in early March, when there was a lot of panic and states began to close off each other, without paying much attention to political relations and statistics on the spread of the virus. “… Although more is known about the virus, as if we knew how to combat it, we see that the crisis in international relations continues,” explains the aviation expert.

The light at the end of the tunnel is not visible

„2019 carried out 30-35 thousand per day. flights, 2020 start until March. It was very similar, then there was a shutdown and a suspension of the world. We sat by the well in March, April, and May. It seemed that things were recovering little by little and little by little we were getting out of it. By July, the curve had gone up slightly, but we can see that the summer is over and the last few weeks show that the number of flights is moving downward.

Air cargo for airlines was poor, with the end of the summer, the number of passengers began to decline further, planes began to empty, and airlines are reducing the number of flights again. Doubts arise as to whether we will not have to go down like this again ”, sums up S. Bartkus the situation in aviation.

According to the rapporteur, none of these crises are still visible at the end of the tunnel of light: “There is no point in solving one of the four crises. Measures are sought, they are being applied. A global pandemic can be solved with a vaccine that will come out sooner or later. So far, we think it will be later than before. As a result, it is difficult to wait for a solution to other crises. “

According to him, all the previous crises have been resolved and people’s desire to travel by air has never disappeared in the long run. S. Bartkus is convinced that it will be exactly the same in this case, but no one knows when and how it will happen.

How did the pandemic respond to ticket prices?

When asked how the pandemic affected airfares, Bartkus explains that airlines are trying to win back passengers because they cannot fundamentally live.

“In normal times, one way to encourage people to travel is very cheap tickets. How much do we buy tickets ourselves just because, for example, we can fly to Barcelona for 5 euros, although I didn’t plan or really need it?” , he comments.

The airlines have now taken similar steps, but according to the expert, there have been no people in the last two months who wanted to travel for free.

“Relatively free, because 3.5 or 9 euros in the total budget of the trip are practically free. I believe that price wars and airline incentives will continue, but not forever, ”says S. Bartkus.