Three years ago, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a pandemic, triggering a largely uncoordinated global response, the two upheavals unleashing a worldwide healthcare, economic, and social crisis whose impacts continue.

The coronavirus had been spreading since its outbreak in China in December 2019, and the pandemic designation less than three months later brought a welter of regulations from federal, regional, state, municipal, and other authorities worldwide that overnight grounded aviation activity, along with most other spheres of global commerce.

No need for a spoiler alert here—business aviation’s remarkable Covid comeback has been well-reported and celebrated. That rebound was hardly a foregone conclusion as financial, regulatory, health, and safety issues threatened to bring the industry down, as anyone in the trenches then can attest. Nor did the rebound come without unprecedented supply and demand issues the industry is still working through.

But the past three years have left a number of questions: What were the keys that enabled business aviation to meet the pandemic’s unique challenges? What did the industry do right, what could have been done better, how has it changed, and what can be done to prepare for the next pandemic?

The Crisis Begins

In the U.S., where transportation is classified as a “critical infrastructure sector,” as it’s recognized by many nations, aviation-related businesses and workers were in many cases exempt from stay-at-home orders and other emergency restrictions, but that didn’t mitigate the economic and health risks, or provide the answers they sought in the WHO declaration’s immediate aftermath.

“Companies were facing the challenge of, ‘How do we preserve our business,’ but equally, ‘How do we make sure we’re adhering to all of our safety standards, and how will we keep our crews trained, and how will we maintain their currency?’” said Argus International president Mike McCready.

For aeromedical and operational professionals, simply “keeping track of how countries, cities, and other municipalities were handling the increase in cases and restrictions to travel” became an all-consuming task, added a spokesperson at MedAire, which advises business aviation clients and more than 180 airlines worldwide on health and security issues.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, the NBAA’s annual Schedulers and Dispatchers Conference was in session and “March Madness was underway” when the pandemic was announced, recalled Ed Bolen, the organization’s president and CEO. The conference hurriedly wrapped as attendees exchanged premature goodbyes.

“At NBAA—and I think a lot of companies—we told our people, ‘Take home your laptops. We’re going to be working from home for a while,’” said Bolen. “We didn’t know for how long. That’s when it all became very real.”

As aftershocks set in, and with their tenants’ businesses largely shut down, many airports faced an economic crisis of their own.

“Some communities were putting moratoriums on payment of rent, and that meant the airports themselves weren’t going to get paid,” said Curt Castagna, president and CEO (then board chair) of the National Air Transportation Association (NATA), and board member of the Los Angeles County Aviation Commission. “We were seeing all these potential economic snowballs that could come crashing down.”

Fleet operators had to make major financial and operational decisions based on little more than gut instinct.

“Nobody knew when the market would rebound, and there were a lot of factors that we could not really control,” said Leona Qi, president of VistaJet U.S., which relied on commercial airlines to position pilots for its global operations—a suddenly dubious proposition. “A lot of companies’ first reaction was to lay off staff,” she said.

Concurrently, these same operators were navigating uncharted routes in the air and on the ground. In the U.S., that included sometimes operating in an ATC-zero environment, after pandemic-triggered control facility closures.

“Our biggest challenge and our highest priority was ensuring the health and well-being of our passengers, and our flight and ground crews,” said CEO Mike Silvestro at fractional ownership program Flexjet.

Surviving the New Abnormal

Communication—exchanging information with colleagues, industry peers, regulators, and elected officials—proved a critical pandemic survival skill early on. With new federal mandates for medically safe transport procedures, “People were picking up the phones, working with one another to understand the rules, whatever the operation—competitors were working together,” said McCready at Argus.

Businesses and people began “to evolve and to adapt,” said Bolen. “As organizations learned about cleaning, or putting crews in bubbles, they would share that information, and people learned from each other what was or wasn’t working, whether at a manufacturing level or the flight operations level—keeping everybody engaged and learning.”

Alphabet groups representing business aviation interests worldwide sought coordinated relief from regulatory requirements in the form of extensions for recurrent medical certification, training, and other requirements that the health crisis made difficult or impossible to meet.

In Europe, members of the European Business Aviation Association “worked closely with regulators, public health authorities, and industry partners to develop best practices for safe operations, and quickly adapted to new operational procedures and technologies to maintain operations,” said EBAA’s senior communications manager, Róman Kok.

In the U.S., industry efforts were capped by business aviation’s inclusion in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and Paycheck Protection Program funding, a direct result of “the federal government knowing who we are, and understanding our community’s problems, allowing us to keep jobs in aviation,” said Bolen.

Passed in late March, industry companies received a total of some $666 million in pandemic assistance and, Bolen added, “helped avert an economic catastrophe.”

Said NATA’s Castagna, “It wasn’t until the CARES Act funding for Part 135 air carriers was approved and Van Nuys [Airport] started to see the benefits of the support, that I knew businesses would be able to keep their workforces and keep going.” 

Malta-based VistaJet, like other non-U.S. companies, was ineligible for such assistance, but “made a key decision to keep every single employee on the payroll,” said Qi. “Our customers had committed to us, buying into our guaranteed availability program, so we committed to them.”

Meanwhile, businesses energetically applied newfound knowledge. Flexjet “took an aggressive approach to Covid prevention,” said Silvestro. Crew members were tested for Covid before each tour, and in-flight health protocols were implemented. Test kits were distributed to crew members at more than 100 domiciles through a relationship with Rutgers University established during previous emergency response training. Flexjet also repurposed several aircraft as company shuttles, allowing crew members to avoid airlines and potential exposure to the coronavirus.

MedAire “doubled down on our infrastructure investments and provided new and different information to help clients better plan and adapt to the ever-changing situation,” said CEO Bill Dolny. The company developed, for example, an application programming interface for its Covid Trip Planner for Collins Aerospace, which used the data to provide ArincDirect flight planning subscribers with up-to-date assessments of the Covid-19 risks and restrictions.

Though its airline clients’ operations were curtailed, utilization of MedAire’s services among business aviation clients climbed more than 30 percent, involving both medical and security concerns, “due to Covid’s impact on the security personnel and safety profile of airport facilities,” the Phoenix, Arizona-based company said.

New York-based lift provider Wheels Up launched a Safe Passage program to provide customers with enhanced health and safety protocols. 

Rebound and Whiplash

U.S. business aviation operations bottomed in April 2020 at some 75,000 flights over the month, according to Argus. Charter was down 67 percent, private flights 72 percent, and fractional flight activity off 80 percent year-over-year. That same month, activity in Europe dropped more than 70 percent.

But from that point on, business aviation traffic grew, becoming a flood during the summer, fueled by health concerns and the concomitant nosedive in commercial flight activity. Charter, jet card, and fractional programs reported unprecedented demand. Qi recalls a swell of calls from people “asking how they could sign up and fly,” and then, “One day in July, we saw that flight traffic was already back to the pre-pandemic level.”

But the rebound compounded the impacts of the supply chain rupture Covid wrought across business aviation, producing “service disruptions, maintenance challenges, and pilot shortages,” as a Wheels Up spokesperson noted.

“That’s when we learned there is actually a limited supply of aircraft and crews available,” said Craig Ross, founder and CEO of Aviation Portfolio, a consultancy that advises clients on business aircraft access programs.

Some providers experiencing the heaviest demand, Flexjet and NetJets among them, suspended membership and fractional ownership sales. Others looked for ways to accommodate new customers. Wheels Up, for example, combined “technological advancements” and “strategic acquisitions” to enhance operations and build its lift supply.

Workforce Crunch

Meanwhile, the much talked about pilot and maintenance technician shortage that existed before the pandemic expanded to include business aviation professionals of all stripes—data and technical analysts, project and account managers, and schedulers and dispatchers.

The shortage also accelerated and expanded diversity and inclusivity efforts in the industry, one of the positives to come from the pandemic, noted NATA’s Castagna, as FBOs, MROs, and others “adapted their HR policies and recruitment efforts to be more creative in bringing people into the industry.”

Concurrently, charter operators expanded recruitment programs to attract fresh talent to the flight deck, as in Wheels Up’s partnership with MAG Aerospace, ATP Flight School, and Delta Propel.

But, Castagna added, henceforth, any and all such efforts to attract talent must recognize another change spurred by the pandemic: A reprioritized “work-life balance, and the importance of the family” among employees today. Already, he said, “Companies in business aviation are transforming” to accommodate these new expectations “from the pilots down to the line service technicians. We didn’t have that perspective early on,” he said.

In addition to unleashing change, the pandemic also “accelerated existing trends in the business aviation industry,” said Kok at the EBAA. He cited digitalization and sustainability as two of those trends, the latter seeing increased “attention being paid to reducing emissions and promoting sustainable aviation fuel.”

Yet while remote work and virtual meetings that became staples of the pandemic workplace have reduced the need for some travel, Kok noted the pandemic also brought “increased demand for flexible, on-demand travel options” to Europe as it did in the U.S.

Attitudes about and demands for hygiene and health safety measures while flying have also remained elevated in the pandemic’s wake, according to MedAire, as evidenced by its “fit-to-fly assessment,” which identifies injuries or illnesses that could result in an in-flight emergency. Clients used the assessment for about 30 percent of flights before the pandemic; today, the figure is more than 40 percent.

Meanwhile, consolidation among charter operators and FBOs, another trend in full blossom when Covid struck, certainly wasn’t slowed by the need for expanded fleets and lift access. Wheels Up, Flexjet parent Directional Aviation Capital, and VistaJet, for example, all grew through acquisitions, and cite efficiencies their expansions have allowed, and the customer benefits they delivered. But the ultimate impact of the wave of roll ups on overall lift access can’t be teased out of operations and fleet data that reflect the unprecedented increase in demand Covid brought to the entire industry.

New Travel Attitudes

The jump in demand demonstrates that changed expectations and attitudes aren’t confined to employees; reoriented priorities among the public played a large role in attracting new-to-business-aviation customers responsible for much of the post-pandemic demand for flying private and an increase in its consumption among long-time users. The pandemic “has taught everyone to value things differently,” said Wheels Up, referencing a strengthened “experience economy.” Said the spokesperson, “Consumers in the experience economy demand not just to be well-traveled, but to travel well; the priority is the quality of the experience versus the quantity.”

Wealthy travelers, added Silvestro at Flexjet, “are reevaluating their use of capital and deploying it to private jet travel, when they may have chosen in the past to use their capital in other ways.” A shift “in what owners and clients want” is also underway, he said.

“Families and groups of executives want to travel together and be able to travel longer distances comfortably,” a shift that plays into Flexjet’s $850 million investment in new large-cabin, long-haul aircraft the company recently ordered or is taking delivery of, he said. “We see that as part of a long-term trend away from the hybrid commercial-private flight model to one in which private aviation takes up a larger share of flight activity.”

Silvestro said customers are also demanding “greater speed and convenience on the ground,” which will drive investment in infrastructure; Flexjet has already “accelerated our existing plan to grow our network of private jet terminals,” as a result, he said.

Echoed Qi at VistaJet, “We keep investing in ourselves and growing our infrastructure to make sure we’re ready for whatever comes. Embrace the next storm: That’s a key lesson we learned from the pandemic,” she said.

But going forward, internal investments need to include education and training programs for continuing employee development, Castagna said, and he believes that’s “more of a priority than infrastructure or other capital investment companies might make.”

But despite investments, initiatives, and concerted efforts to meet demand, supply-chain issues and staffing shortages show no signs of easing, and while providers talk of the challenges of meeting demand that creates, customers feel it personally.

“The supply chain, pilot shortages, pandemic issues—There’s a whole list of excuses that has allowed our industry to lower the bar for service,” said Ross at Aviation Portfolio, who advocates for clients that belong to a select number of charter and fractional programs. “These industry issues are real, but you’re running a business,” he continued. “You’ve got to figure out how to get better, how to improve, how to evolve. You don’t wave the white flag and say, ‘It’s an industry thing, so we’re just not going be as good as we used to be.’”

Meanwhile, the changing demands of another key constituency, Costagna cautioned, could upend the industry if ignored: “Communities around general aviation airports that have seen increased [post-pandemic] activity are asking about the quality of life impacts,” he said, while citing ongoing high-profile airport closure efforts as bellwethers. NATA’s own constituency on the ground side of the business puts Castagna in a position to know.

He recommended retiring “business owners and leaders as key ambassadors,” and to “change the message on the value of business aviation” to emphasize burgeoning mainstream access options such as Part 380 per-seat charter flights, and overnight cargo deliveries. “There’s a distortion that [business aviation] is just for the one-percenters, and it’s not,” he said. “It’s about the movement of goods and people.”

Ready or Not

The federal Covid-19 public health emergency is scheduled to officially expire on May 11.

Among the positives for business aviation in its wake: “We know better how to communicate, how to operate more remotely, and more about health issues than we did,” said Bolen. “Having gone through something like that, you emerge stronger—but ‘stronger’ doesn’t mean coming through unscathed.”

Another plus, he said, “The enduring benefits of business aviation that a lot of people recognized were perhaps reevaluated and better understood at a time when flexibility, predictability, and safety all came into question.”

As for potential areas to improve, Kok at EBAA said that business aviation “might have benefited from greater contingency planning, particularly in terms of supply chain disruptions and adapting to changing travel restrictions.”

Argus, whose auditing services cover all facets of operational procedures, reports a number of its certified companies “want to be more proactive” in developing pandemic contingency plans, said McCready. “We are looking at how changes such as modifying their SMS can help them be more aligned with today’s concerns—Who’s to say we shouldn’t have that in our ops manuals, so we have a base to work from?”

Looking back and ahead, MedAire strongly recommended recognizing the pandemic’s impact on mental health, citing increases in “anxiety, depression, and PTSD among aviation industry workers, including pilots, flight attendants, and ground crew.”

In response, aviation companies should provide employees with mental health resources and support, MedAire said. Left unaddressed, these issues “could lead to long-term mental health consequences, including chronic stress, burnout, and reduced job satisfaction, which may ultimately impact the safety and efficiency of the aviation industry.”