Brazilian air travel’s pandemic crisis, in numbers

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the aviation sector was one of the first to go. Countries around the world closed their borders, flights were grounded, and airports turned into veritable ghost towns. A report released in mid-December by the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) has translated the palpable collapse of the sector into figures: the number of passengers fell 53 percent in relation to 2019, while the quantity of transported cargo dipped 29.6 percent.

While these findings hardly come as a surprise, the novelty of the IBGE study is that it breaks down figures on a city-by-city basis, allowing the observation of some interesting trends. For instance, civil aviation in the southern city of Curitiba was most affected by the pandemic...