The Pandemic and the Future of the Skies

Last time, we watched ANA rise in scale, the LCCs break down the wall of fares, and air travel reach the hands of many people. A diverse, vibrant sky spread out, and people came to board airplanes more casually than ever before. In the very midst of that bustle, something no one had foreseen occurred.

In 2020, the epidemic that covered the world — the COVID-19 pandemic — stopped the very movement of people. Borders were closed; business trips, travel, and returns home were all held back; and human figures vanished from the airports. In this story, which becomes the final chapter, I would like to survey everything from those days when the skies themselves fell still, through the gradual recovery, to the new mission of decarbonization, and so bring this long story of Japan’s skies to a close.

The Day the Sky Stopped

There was a phrase: the evaporation of demand. When speaking of the aviation industry under the COVID crisis, it was not a metaphor but, in the literal sense, reality.

As each country restricted entry and people refrained from moving, the use of airplanes fell rapidly. International routes in particular were driven, for a time, into a state where almost no flights could fly, it is reported. The aircraft sat lined up on the ground, unmoving, and yet the maintenance costs kept coming. For an airline, there was no situation more brutal than this. ANA and JAL together booked enormous losses, and are said to have fallen into deficits of a scale unprecedented even in their respective histories. If JAL’s bankruptcy that we saw in Episode 8 was a problem of one company’s management, this time the two giants together faced a storm that had attacked from outside.

The crisis was not a problem of the companies’ numbers alone. There, the lives of the many people who support the sky were at stake.

Not Folding the Wings

Faced with enormous losses, what the two companies took most gravely to heart was the question of how to protect employment.

According to reports, the two companies asked their employees to share the pain through cuts to bonuses and revisions to pay, while on the other hand they tried to maintain employment by way of secondment — temporarily sending employees out to other companies. Airline employees working on the front lines of completely different industries, such as electronics retailers and supermarkets — such scenes were seen in many places. For each airline, the personnel they had trained through repeated effort are the most precious asset of all, the ones who would bear the recovery beyond the crisis. That is precisely why, even amid hardship, the struggle to hold employment together continued, so as not to fold the wings entirely.

Before long, as the situation around infection settled little by little and travel restrictions were eased, the stopped flow of people began to return. It is reported that the demand of people visiting Japan from overseas, in particular, supported the recovery. People once again filled the airports, and aircraft returned to the sky one after another. Having crossed a long winter, Japan’s skies came back to life. Yet the pace of recovery differed by route and by period, and the wounds and lessons the crisis left behind were not things that would vanish right away.

Decarbonization, the Next Horizon

The new mission that the sky beyond the crisis faces is decarbonization — the response to climate change.

The airplane, behind its convenience, burns fuel and emits a great deal of carbon dioxide. As concern about climate change rose worldwide, the aviation industry too came to be strongly asked to bear the responsibility of reducing emissions. At the center of this is what is called SAF, sustainable aviation fuel. This fuel, made from raw materials such as used cooking oil and biomass, is said to be able to greatly curb CO2 emissions compared with conventional fuel when viewed across the whole process from being made to being burned.

To carry people far without emitting carbon dioxide. Into this seemingly contradictory wish, the aviation industry is trying to pour technology and wisdom. More fuel-efficient new aircraft, the cutting of waste in operation, and the spread of SAF. Precisely because none of these can advance overnight, here too there is no shortcut, and a long accumulation is required.

Toward the Japanese Skies to Come

After the war, this story began from an era when Japan’s skies were closed along with defeat, when it was not even permitted to have one’s own nation’s wings. Through independence, a national flag carrier was born; the jumbo jet flew the great sky; the latecomer challenger grew into a corner of the two giants; the state set the division between the two companies, and eventually undid it and steered toward an era of competition. There was a summer that experienced deep sorrow; there were alliances that took flight into the world’s skies; there were the bankruptcy that lost the wings and the rebuilding that followed. And then the arrival of the LCCs that opened the sky to the masses, and the pandemic that shook everything. It was a long road.

Looking back over the whole of it, we do not intend to hurriedly hold out a conclusion that says ‘therefore it should be this way.’ Which of ANA and JAL was right, which of competition and cooperation is more desirable — to fit a single answer to such questions, the story of the sky is far too rich, made of far too many people’s endeavors.

The sky takes off again tomorrow. Glory and setback, competition and cooperation, convenience and its cost — if gazing upon that light and shadow at the same time leads us to know anew the miracle that lies right beside us, called the journey of the skies, there would be no joy greater than this. From the scorched ruins of the postwar to the as-yet-unseen sky of decarbonization. To all the readers who have read this long story this far, I give my heartfelt thanks. Without rushing to an answer, let us go on gazing together at where Japan’s skies are headed.

【ANA and JAL: The Story of Japan’s Skies — End】