Source: Used with permission. Gerald Friedrich/Pixabay (2020).
A nearly empty terminal at Frankfurt Airport at 2 PM on Wednesday, April 15, 2020. Frankfurt is one of Europe’s busiest air transport hubs and, during a normal weekday, handles more than 200,000 passengers. In March 2020, several governments started to impose lockdowns in view of the Covid 19 pandemic, which shut down the majority of international air traffic and domestic air travel went into a trickle. In April 2020, Frankfurt Airport handled about 188,000 passengers, a decline of 97% compared with April 2019. Thus, because of the pandemic, the airport handled as many passengers in a month as it usually does in a single day. This represented a massive loss of revenue for the airlines and the airport, including workers and service providers that depend on continuous high-volume traffic.