Changes of Northeast Asian Air Cargo Network During Covid-19 Pandemic

While the outbreak of Covid-19 brought in enormous damage throughout world economically, socially, and culturally, the aviation industry was severely damaged because air passenger transportation was barely active during the pandemic due to movement restrictions and blockades imposed in many countries. This study aims at investigating changes of air cargo transportation network which were made before and during the pandemic. To this end, this study collected air freight data among Korea, China, Japan, Hong Kong, and Macau as origin and destination countries. Freight revenue traffic data of On-flight origin and destination were collected from ICAO database from 2016 to 2020 with years of 2016 to 2019 being before the outbreak of Covid-19 and year of 2020 being after it. Social Network Analysis was undertaken using Netminer. It was found that nodes, links, density, and clustering of Northeast Asian air cargo networks significantly decreased after the outbreak of Covid-19 and network connection was also weakened.