SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2024

This research mainly focuses on the impact that the airline industry in mainland China has suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic between the start of 2020 and the end of 2022. This research initially examines the progression of the pandemic, from a broad viewpoint, to assess the immediate impacts on the aviation sector at various intervals, quantifying the primary losses. It then explores the determinants of airlines’ operating performance using regression analysis, focusing on metrics such as Available Seat Kilometers (ASK), Revenue Passenger Kilometers (RPK), and Passenger Load Factor (PLF). Moreover, the study categorizes Chinese airlines based on their ownership and service approach to investigate if varying management tactics lead to different outcomes in the face of the pandemic. It also includes an analysis using the Differences-in-Differences (DiD) Model to determine if these diverse strategies experienced varied impacts. The regression analyses have shown that Private-owned enterprises (POE) have performed better than State-owned enterprises (SOE) in net profit due to the flexibility in cost reduction. Although current statistics do not advocate the hypothesis that Low-cost carriers (LCC) have performed better than Full-service Carriers (FSC), this research has investigated the cost-reducing strategy of LCCs and pointed out that more research could be done in the future when more post-pandemic data are collected, using a more advanced econometric model.