Global air travel fell by 60% in 2020, but one of the world’s largest airlines did nothing but grow. FedEx, with close to 700 aircraft, benefited from the lockdown home-delivery bump with record quarterly earnings, partly by picking up slack from canceled flights. About 65% of goods shipped between Europe and the U.S. normally travel in the belly of passenger planes. “That went away,” says Donald Colleran, president and CEO of FedEx Express, which added flights to handle that extra business. “We moved orders of new aircraft as quickly as we could. We brought in planes we had used as spares, planes that we had parked in the desert.” In December, the company also delivered the first COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S.
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