Infographic: Three Charts about the Aviation Industry

Hardly any business is more emblematic of the so-called Before Time—the years before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic—than aviation. Airlines crammed strangers from all over the world next to each other in increasingly packed aircraft cabins. Air travel was the lynchpin of many other activities, from corporate acquisitions and trade show attendance to honeymoons in Hawaii, but it also helped the coronavirus pandemic spread around the globe. In the spring of 2020, when the world economy essentially shut down in an effort to halt that spread, airlines basically stopped flying.

In the United States, the vaccination of around half the population has led to the resumption of air travel. But as anyone who has flown in recent months can attest, things are not back to where they were.