Building a path through the pandemic isn’t an easy task.

Creating it when the nation can’t even determine the exact impact or challenge at hand is making it daunting.

Trudging through the national crisis has tested the limits of what the nation is willing to endure, especially with the transportation system. Revenues are down, directives are murky and the next steps are being built as we try to climb out of this.

And just the whisper of a mask mandate on a plane or at an airport creates such a rile within certain consortia of the public proves many are incapable of meeting even the basic steps to curb the crisis.  

The aviation challenge through all of this is well known, but there’s still a massive perception issue at hand. Steadying or even mild increases in passenger traffic at an airport lead to spikes in optimism in the community. Optimism is important in a crisis, but grasping at too short of straws are creating pillars of confidence in some to prove the worst is behind us.

I recently was sent a survey stating that while 67 percent of the population is afraid to fly in the pandemic, only 23 percent are canceling their travel plans. Gee, what good news. I can’t wait to see who solves the passenger experience conundrum for a traveling public mentally wrestling with terror and boredom.

Plenty inside the industry are doing mental gymnastics too. Some think we’ll be back to business come 2021. Others have already written off the whole decade as a loss. Some predict golden days for the airlines again soon, others predict consolidation. Others have already written the obituary for international service by U.S. carriers due in part to other nations handling the crisis much better.   

All of them make valid points, but everyone is playing with the same deck of cards, so the variance in results says to me the real answers is no one really knows what’s going to happen.

I think that’s the most important perspective we can keep right now. We don’t know what tomorrow holds with this crisis and we don’t know how long it will last.  But what we do know there’s a major issue at hand and unless federal leadership steps to the challenge now, the future of aviation in the U.S. is going to be even less unknown.

We get one chance to make this right before the worst case scenarios come to pass.