AccuWeather Global Weather Center – May 14, 2020 – The coronavirus pandemic has crushed U.S. airlines in ways so devastating, abrupt and potentially long term that a return to the recent normalcy of February could be years or more away.
There has been a 93 percent drop in passenger volume for U.S. airlines since February, after roughly 5 percent growth in January-February, according to Airlines for America. That has led airlines to idle 52 percent of the total of 6,100-plus U.S. passenger aircraft as of May 12. Just 5 percent were grounded on Feb. 29.
On Tuesday, the CEO of plane maker Boeing predicted on NBC’s Today show that a major U.S. airline would go out of business by this fall. “Something will happen when September comes around,” said Boeing CEO David Calhoun.
The rest of May and all of June – the heart of tornado season – should be a more immediate concern for the airlines. Many of those idled planes are parked in areas prone to tornadoes or severe storms at this time of year.
“Airplanes are sitting ducks in this crisis,” said AccuWeather lead long-range meteorologist Paul Pastelok.
“I was surprised to see the planes parked in places where things could be bad because of the weather,” said AccuWeather’s Geoff Knauth, a pilot with more than 41 years of flying experience. “The question is, if there is a tornado bearing down, how do you move things quickly enough?”
Airports have closed some runways and parked planes in Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Denver, as well as tornado-prone sites such as Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Kansas City and Tulsa, Oklahoma, among other locations.