The global aviation industry is dealing with an unprecedented operational crisis, particularly amid fuel availability crisis. Airlines have collectively cancelled as much as 2 million seats and 12,000 flights from May schedules just in the past two weeks, as the Strait of Hormuz blockade tightens its grip on jet fuel supply chains.
This is a novel problem for the airline industry, which had always planned around fuel price, including hedging, adjusting routes and tweaking deployment. However, planning around fuel availability is something the industry has never faced before, especially at this scale.
The cuts have been witness across carriers and continents. Turkish Airlines, Air China and Lufthansa are among the airlines which have made the deepest reductions in both seat and flights, according to aviation data firm Cirium, as relayed by Financial Times.
Lufthansa alone has cancelled as many as 20,000 flights through October. Emirates, United Airlines, British Airways, American Airlines and All Nippon Airways have also significant capacity, with smaller reductions across KLM, Delta and others.
Responses from government across the globe have also been interesting. Authorities across Singapore and Tokyo have asked carriers not to add extra services to limit jet fuel consumption. Vietnam has gone a step further by introducing outright rationing for aviation.
This ongoing phenomenon in the industry comes in the midst of peak summer travel season, which is usually the busiest and most commercially critical period of the year for airlines. Carriers are now carefully calculating which routes to process and which routes to sacrifice.
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