Introduction

The COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) pandemic has shaken the airline industry to the core, strongly reinforcing a need for leadership and management answers to extremely challenging conditions which result from operating in volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous (VUCA) environments. While especially the airline industry is well weathered in terms of managing different crises, the intensity and multiplicity of the COVID-19 pandemic reached a yet unseen criticality attributable to its mutually reinforcing combination of both substantial operational and economic challenges (Suk & Kim, 2021). To date, little detailed insight on management responses to the COVID-19 pandemic has been provided, and literally none has been provided with regard to airline management teams and their COVID-19 crisis decision-making (Lukić et al., 2020).