Ky­ron Reg­is

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

As he is­sued an ur­gent call to gov­ern­ments in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean to help the avi­a­tion sec­tor, the Vice Pres­i­dent of the In­ter­na­tion­al Air Trans­port As­so­ci­a­tion (IA­TA), ar­gued that re­gion­al cit­i­zens must learn to live with the nov­el coro­n­avirus.

In a re­gion­al con­fer­ence call Pe­ter Cerdá said: “While we un­der­stand the mea­sures that gov­ern­ments have tak­en to pro­tect their cit­i­zens dur­ing this pub­lic health cri­sis, we need to learn to live with COVID-19. We will need to co-ex­ist with the virus un­til a vac­cine is made avail­able.”

Dur­ing the con­fer­ence call, Cerdá called on the gov­ern­ments in the re­gion to pro­vide the re­quest­ed fi­nan­cial sup­port to the air­lines —now. He said: “The word ‘now’ is so ur­gent.”

Ac­cord­ing to Cerdá, the in­dus­try is op­er­at­ing on life sup­port, but it can­not go on in the same man­ner for much longer.

Air­lines in the re­gion sus­pend­ed op­er­a­tions since late March. The IA­TA VP not­ed they can­not af­ford to re­main ground­ed for an ad­di­tion­al month or two. If this hap­pens, he ex­plained that the ground­ing could be—per­ma­nent.

IA­TA re­cent­ly re­leased its fi­nan­cial out­look for the glob­al air trans­port in­dus­try show­ing that air­lines are ex­pect­ed to lose US $84.3 bil­lion in 2020 for a net prof­it mar­gin of—20.1 per cent. The or­gan­i­sa­tion al­so re­vealed that rev­enues will fall by 50 per cent to US $419 bil­lion from US $838 bil­lion in 2019.

It added that in 2021, loss­es are ex­pect­ed to drop to US $15.8 bil­lion as rev­enues rise to US $598 bil­lion.

IA­TA al­so as­sert­ed that Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean gov­ern­ments re­main the least sup­port­ive of avi­a­tion, not­ing it is an in­dus­try that pri­or to COVID-19 con­tributed US$167 bil­lion to their GDPs and sup­port­ed 7.2 mil­lion jobs through­out the re­gion.

The or­gan­i­sa­tion’s fore­casts cur­rent­ly show a drop of at least US$77 bil­lion in air trans­port’s con­tri­bu­tion to GDP, with more than 3.5 mil­lion jobs at risk.

Mean­while, Cerdá said: “This is our last chance to sur­vive this cri­sis. Time is against us and every day that goes by places more agony on an in­dus­try that is seek­ing clar­i­ty on time­lines to restart op­er­a­tions. No sec­tor has the liq­uid­i­ty to stay afloat dur­ing a four—or five-month stand­still.”