We Will Recover!

It is a very sad fact of life that bad news gets more attention than good news. 

Following this, the news surrounding the current status of the global aviation industry must be very popular, to say the least!

Media tag lines are merely meant to attract attention and most often do not tell the whole story by design rather than oversight. 

As the bad news story unfolds, there are always some embedded points of light that paint a much more optimistic picture than the headline itself. 

I would like to call our attention not to the rhetoric of darkness and despair, but more realistically, to those points of light that are keeping air transportation alive today and will form the basis for our future.

Firstly, the level of cooperation and collaboration among industry stakeholders has never been more productive than it is today. 

We have seen the FAA and other regulators put forth risk-based waivers and exemptions regarding licensing, medicals, and recurrent training periods in order to safely meet the challenges of self-quarantining and reduced operations. 

Flight attendants are being allowed to practice onboard social distancing by occupying vacant passenger seats for taxi, takeoff, and landing. 

Airport authorities and airlines are working together to ensure an end-to-end sanitary and hygienic travel experience for our passengers. 

ICAO, EASA, FAA, Flight Safety Foundation, and other organizations are providing meaningful and medically sound guidance to passengers, flight crews, and ground crew on the best ways to manage the risk of contagion while conducting their essential duties.

Secondly, this current scenario is most assuredly not cast in stone as our future.  It won’t happen overnight, but the industry will realign and reconfigure in order to effectively operate under the “new normal”. 

Organizational structures will be trimmed, standard operating procedures will be changed, training program content & methodologies will be revised.

Quality assurance oversight will become equally focused on health and hygiene standards as well as regulatory compliance. 

We will be doing what we have always done but in a new, more efficient, and contagion conscious manner.

Lastly, in order to get from here to there, the industry will depend upon strong and focused leadership addressing the challenges of tomorrow with the people of today! 

Reduced work schedules and associated compensation decrements are never welcome. 

However, they represent a far better long-term alternative than drastically cutting a workforce overnight and forcing talented and experienced employees onto the streets thereby potentially losing them forever. 

There is no question that everyone in our industry now understands what our lack of preparation and collective minimization of risk has really meant to our way of life. 

The flip side is that now, more than ever, we are all willing to fully engage in collective problem solving under credible leadership in order to recover and secure the future.

We will recover.  We will be different, but we will recover. 

As global aviation industry leaders, please continue to lead by example in a positive and credible manner, acknowledging the challenges of the present, while leading your respective organizations into a new future.

Please stay safe!