Covid-19 Industry
E195, seen here, being operated by Vietnam’s Bamboo Airways taking off from Con Dao Island, a world heritage site. Importantly Japan Airlines, having understood the importance of fleet management, is employing its Embraer regional jets on domestic routes.
Smaller The Better It is clear that the philosophy of Smaller the Better is perhaps the most viable option for airlines to improve the economy of operations and hence ensure better economic performance of the airlines
Photograph: embraer
By Air Marshal B.K. Pandey (Retd) The CoronaVirus epidemic that is supposed to have originated from the city of Wuhan in the Hubei Province of China in December 2019, spread rapidly across the globe affecting more than 200 countries across the globe. In fact, in early March this year, the focal point of the Coronavirus epidemic that is also referred to as COVID-19 Pandemic, shifted from China to Europe, with Italy being the worst affected nation in the world. Other nations in Europe including the United Kingdom (UK) were also badly affected. In the following month i.e. in April 2020, it was the United States of America (USA) that had also fallen prey to the COVID-19 Pandemic, took the lead with more than 40 million people, which is about 25 per cent of the population, being infected by the virus. What was more tragic was that by this time, there were more than 1.1 million fatalities in the USA. This was a clear indication that by this time,
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the focus of the COVID-19 Pandemic had definitely shifted from Europe to the American continent. However, India was not to be left behind as it soon fell victim to the COVID-19 Pandemic and by the first week of May this year, there were around 60,000 cases that tested positive with the infection by the Coronavirus. And the number kept increasing as with a population of more than 1.3 billion, the second largest in the world, it was definitely an extremely challenging task for the government to control the spread of this disease. The rate at which the Coronavirus spread in this country of ours, can be gauged from the fact that by November this year, the number of infected persons in India has gone up to eighty seven lakh and there appears to be little hope of abatement of the Pandemic. The spread of the virus proved to be uncontrollable on account of the fact that there was neither a vaccine avail-
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