COVID-19: Brazil charts its own course to combat aviation crisis

Latin America's largest aviation market, Brazil, is opting not to follow the lead of some governments in the region in completely shutting off their domestic air operations.

Instead, Brazil is offering a bare minimum of domestic service, and has emerged as one of the few governments in Latin America offering some sort of direct assistance to airlines.

Even as Brazil's domestic airspace remains open the capacity cuts by the nation's airlines are stark, with Azul and GOL cutting their supply by 90% or more.

There is no way to predict accurately when the global aviation industry will return to normal, but Azul is holding a positive view that it could possibly be close to a full schedule in Jul-2020, in a current scenario where COVID-19 is a challenge for two to three months.

There have been some dire predictions about the survivability of Latin Airlines after the COVID-19 crisis is over, but at this point in time Brazil's major airlines seem reasonably well positioned to endure the fallout from the pandemic. However, that could quickly change, given the extremely fluid situation caused by the virus' spread.