On the ramifications of airspace bans in aero-political conflicts: Towards a country importance ranking.

The aviation industry is facing highly volatile developments in the recent years: Following a steady growth phase with prosperous projections, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the aviation system rather hard. While having gradually entered a recovery process in the years 2021 and 2022, with load factors close to those in the year 2019, the airspace bans between Russia, Europe, and other regions in the world, as part of the ongoing conflict centered around Russia and Ukraine, threaten the orderly operation of flights. This study explores the byproducts and potential impact of airspace bans on the aviation system and its stakeholders, by deriving a ranking of country importance and how they have the potential to influence our aviation system.

A data-driven analysis of the aviation recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Summer 2022, after a lean COVID-19 spell of almost three years, many airlines reported profits and some airlines even outperformed their pre-pandemic records. In context of the perceived recovery, it is interesting to understand how different markets have gone through the pandemic challenges. In this study, we perform a spatial and temporal dissection of the recovery process the global aviation system went through since May 2020.

On the contagion leakage via incoming flights during China's aviation policies in the fight against COVID-19.

For nearly three years with the COVID-19 pandemic, China has implemented a set of strict policies to control the flux of potential virus carriers in cross-border flights: The so-called Circuit Breaker mechanism. In this study, we review the evolution of this mechanism - a rather unique experiment in the global aviation system - from a data-driven perspective. Specifically, we perform an investigation on the extent of violations and their potential drivers.

COVID-19 pandemic and air transportation: Summary of Recent Research, Policy Consideration and Future Research Directions.

The COVID-19 pandemic can be considered an unparalleled disruption to the aviation industry in the last century. Starting with an at-that-time inconceivable reduction in the number of flights from March 2020 to May 2020, the aviation industry has been trying to navigate through and out of the crisis. This process is accompanied with a significant number of scientific studies, reporting on the direct and indirect impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on aviation and vice versa.

Ghostbusters: Hunting abnormal flights in Europe during COVID-19.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in airline history, with irregular flight bans, the inability for accurate demand estimation, several turns in the epidemiological evolution, and a wide range of downstream effects on all aviation stakeholders. While most airlines have increasingly entered a recovery stage, compared to the utmost disruption around April 2020, the airline business is far from back-to-normality. Throughout the past two years, recurrent statements have been made regarding the existence of so-called ghost flights, where airlines operate nearly empty aircraft on markets with insufficient demand, partially with the aim to avoid losing precious airport slots.

Air transportation as a puzzle piece of COVID-19 in Africa?

COVID-19 has hit our society hard, with more than 242 million cases reported worldwide and more than 4.9 million directly related fatalities. The role of Africa throughout the pandemic has been puzzling, since the African continent seems to have gone through the pandemic better than other continents; clearly better than predicted by the public during the emergence of COVID-19 one year ago.

STARTUPS: Founding airlines during COVID-19 - A hopeless endeavor or an ample opportunity for a better aviation system?

The devastating impact of COVID-19 on aviation is unprecedented and undoubted in the recent sci-entific literature, with many studies having dissected different facets of COVID-19-induced changes to the industry. A few studies have stepped further and highlighted that the COVID-19 pandemic could have positive long-term impacts on aviation. Given that traditional air carriers are known to be reluctant for performing high-risk experiments outside their business-as-usual, parts of hope for a better aviation future rests on novel players entering the industry.

Delayed reaction towards emerging COVID-19 variants of concern: Does history repeat itself?

After more than a year with COVID-19, it becomes increasingly clear that certain variants of concern have the potential to be game changers, determining the future of our aviation. These variants pose significant health threats and possibly undermine ongoing vaccination efforts. Recent research showed that flight bans on the initial SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in January 2020 were implemented too late and therefore, turned out to be largely ineffective, enabling a swift turn into a fully-blown pandemic.

Vaccination passports: Challenges for a future of air transportation.

COVID-19 has been a major setback for air transportation; many airlines had to request for bailouts and the international flights connectivity is only restarting slowly. Accordingly, many aviation stakeholders put hopes into the ongoing process of vaccination, with the expectation that a high degree of vaccination will push the envelope for a return to normalcy. One prerequisite for reviving international air connectivity is the introduction of verification documents, also called "vaccination passports".

Technological and educational challenges towards pandemic-resilient aviation.

While COVID-19 has devastating effects on aviation, several recent studies have highlighted the potential of the pandemic-induced break for rethinking air transportation, hopefully orchestrating changes towards the construction of a more pandemic-resilient aviation system. Here, pandemic-resilient means that aviation stakeholders can sustain the impact of an epidemic or pandemic outbreak through a more informed reallocation of their resources and more collaborative decision making, while being able to minimize the impacts of external events. Our study contributes to the literature by discussing the challenges associated with technological innovation and education of aviation professionals, on the way towards pandemic-resilient aviation.

TLQP: Early-stage transportation lock-down and quarantine problem.

The advent of COVID-19 is a sensible reminder of the vulnerability of our society to pandemics. We need to be better prepared for finding ways to stem such outbreaks. Except from social distancing and wearing face masks, restricting the movement of people is one important measure necessary to control the spread.

COVID-19 pandemic and air transportation: Successfully navigating the paper hurricane.

This paper aims to analyze and understand the impact of the corona virus disease (COVID-19) on aviation and also the role aviation played in the spread of COVID-19, by reviewing the recent scientific literature. We have collected 110 papers on the subject published in the year 2020 and grouped them according to their major application domain, leading to the following categories: Analysis of the global air transportation system during COVID-19, the impacts on the passenger-centric flight experience, and the long-term impacts on broad aviation. Based on the aggregated reported findings in the literature, this paper concludes with a set of recommendations for future scientific directions; hopefully helping aviation to prepare for a post-COVID-19 world.

On the degree of synchronization between air transport connectivity and COVID-19 cases at worldwide level.

COVID-19 is one of the most impactful pandemics in recent history, not only in terms of direct casualties but also regarding socio-economic impact. The goal of our study is to investigate the degree of synchronization between the number of confirmed cases in specific countries, on one hand, and how/at which stage these countries adapted their air transportation operations, on the other hand. We investigate the global air transportation system as a network of countries whose edges represent the existence of direct flights.

How did COVID-19 impact air transportation? A first peek through the lens of complex networks.

The current outbreak of COVID-19 is an unprecedented event in air transportation. This is probably the first time that global aviation contributed to the planet-wide spread of a pandemic, with casualties in over two hundred countries. As of August 23rd, 2020, the number of infected cases has topped 23 million, reportedly relating to more than 800,000 deaths worldwide.

A comparative analysis of approaches to network-dismantling.

Estimating, understanding, and improving the robustness of networks has many application areas such as bioinformatics, transportation, or computational linguistics. Accordingly, with the rise of network science for modeling complex systems, many methods for robustness estimation and network dismantling have been developed and applied to real-world problems. The state-of-the-art in this field is quite fuzzy, as results are published in various domain-specific venues and using different datasets.

Sequence Factorization with Multiple References.

The success of high-throughput sequencing has lead to an increasing number of projects which sequence large populations of a species. Storage and analysis of sequence data is a key challenge in these projects, because of the sheer size of the datasets. Compression is one simple technology to deal with this challenge.

On-Demand Indexing for Referential Compression of DNA Sequences.

The decreasing costs of genome sequencing is creating a demand for scalable storage and processing tools and techniques to deal with the large amounts of generated data. Referential compression is one of these techniques, in which the similarity between the DNA of organisms of the same or an evolutionary close species is exploited to reduce the storage demands of genome sequences up to 700 times. The general idea is to store in the compressed file only the differences between the to-be-compressed and a well-known reference sequence.

FRESCO: Referential compression of highly similar sequences.

In many applications, sets of similar texts or sequences are of high importance. Prominent examples are revision histories of documents or genomic sequences. Modern high-throughput sequencing technologies are able to generate DNA sequences at an ever-increasing rate.

Adaptive efficient compression of genomes.

: Modern high-throughput sequencing technologies are able to generate DNA sequences at an ever increasing rate. In parallel to the decreasing experimental time and cost necessary to produce DNA sequences, computational requirements for analysis and storage of the sequences are steeply increasing. Compression is a key technology to deal with this challenge.