One Year with COVID-19: The Impact on Air Transportation throughout 2020

Air transportation, in particular, has faced unprecedented effects by COVID-19 in terms of flight cancellations and airline bailouts; some argue that the air transportation sector is probably amongthe hardest hit. In this study, we explore the impact of COVID-19 on air transportation as a networked system throughout the year 2020, while taking the unaffected year 2019 as reference. Exploiting recently developed techniques in data science and network science, we analyzed the temporal evolution of air transportation networks at several scales of fractality, including airports, countries, and continents. Our study provides a comprehensive, data-driven analysis, enhanced with pointers into the recent literature, dissecting the impact of the COVID-19 on aviation as a networked system. It is hoped that this work not only improves understanding of COVID-19, butalso gives anchor points on how to better handle future pandemics.