[perspectivezoom]

I just watched a video about this, that basically goes over all your points: "Air Cargo's Coronavirus Problem" by Wendover Productions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2oPk20OHBE

A summary of the video:

- Passenger flight belly cargo used to be responsible for 25% of air cargo capacity, so capacity is severely reduced.

- PPE emergency logistics has caused a huge spike in demand, since PPE allocations are currently too volatile for anything except for air cargo. Air cargo prices are high.

- Government funding for airlines require pilots to remain on salary, so there's no additional marginal cost of labor.

- The biggest marginal cost of a flight, the cost of fuel, has understandably also become very cheap.

The end result is that even though it's still quite inefficient as compared to dedicated freight planes, the perfect storm of circumstances makes passenger-planes-as-cargo-planes momentarily profitable.

[mynameishere]

I like the shot of airline workers acting like old-fashioned stevedores loading packages one-by-one into the passenger cabin.

the cost of fuel, has understandably also become very cheap

Apparently, jet fuel was down around 40 cents a gallon. Kerosene, basically the same stuff, was never anywhere near that. Pretty strange.

[Waterluvian]

Tangent: are there a ton of pilots struggling to remain qualified and well practiced given all the flights not flying?

[9nGQluzmnq3M]

From what I understand, most airlines are rotating the few remaining shifts. This way each pilot gets a couple of flights per month, which is enough to keep their ratings.

That said, since many airlines have completely stopped flying some plane types (particulary the A380 superjumbo), those pilots are going to have a problem soon.

[gsnedders]

AFAIK, some airlines were scheduling _extremely_ few flights of larger aircraft purely to keep currency.

[thetinguy]

You can check reddit.com/r/flying to see how pilots are doing.