MSUA: Even after more than a year since the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the world is still fighting against the virus and its many variants. As a result, sanitary restrictions are still applied in several countries impacting the ability or easiness to travel by air, domestically and internationally. Hence, the international air traffic is struggling to recover its pre-COVID levels. On the other hand, the releases of lockdowns and other measures like ramped-up vaccinations taken at the country level have certainly helped partial recovery for at least the domestic air travel markets. In some countries like Russia and China, the domestic air traffic has already overpassed the pre-COVID levels. All in all, the recovery of the global aviation industry, and therefore of the In-Flight Connectivity market in general, is currently not expected before 2022 with disparities between domestic and international markets.
The historical drop in traffic has created a financial crisis for most airlines globally. According to the IATA, airlines have continuously experienced a negative EBIT margin greater than 35% on average since the first quarter of 2020. Following the differences in market dynamics as described previously, an improvement of the financial situation is likely to occur initially for airlines with little exposure to international travel. Therefore, in the short term, airlines might apply reverse thrusters on the investments related to the In-Flight Connectivity solutions
