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These difficulties were exacerbated by the global downturn, which has already claimed the scalp of Sabena, together with other smaller airlines Even Swissair may not survive. Then came 11 September.
That hit airlines directly for the most terrible of reasons but it also gravely affected an already damaged world economy. When people are both frightened and hard up, they don’t travel if they can help it. In the past week or two there were just the early signs of a recovery taking place, and the airlines were beginning to learn to live with lower passenger loads.Now it is likely that this recovery will be aborted. It is, of course, impossible to do more than guess how many percentage points such a disaster will knock off passenger loads. As a rule of thumb, airlines had recovered about half the loss of traffic that had occurred post- 11 September: from a collapse of 30 per cent to one of about 15 per cent.

Now the best guess for the US at least must be that things will for several weeks be back to that 30 per cent decline. That is a commercial catastrophe.Sadly, it is just the start. The airline industry is the lynchpin of the much larger travel and tourism business, which accounts for about 11 per cent of global GDP On some definitions it is the world’s largest business. Many parts of the business cannot survive without air travel: holiday islands, resorts relying on short-break weekends away, much of the ski trade. So while travel and tourism in general will not cease, some segments of these industries will find it very difficult to survive.

As so often happens, it is the weakest that will bear the greatest pain: developing countries that rely on tourism for the bulk of their hard currency earnings.That blow will proportionately be even larger than the blows that have, in the past two months, struck New York. The New York metropolitan region is, with Tokyo, the largest single chunk of the world economy: something like 2 per cent of it. But its importance is larger, because of the psychological significance of its financial markets.Of course, eventually travel and tourism will recover New York will recover. The world economy is self-healing – but many of the small and medium-sized businesses that depend on it will not Then there are the knock-on effects.

As we saw in Britain with the foot-and-mouth epidemic, a blow to one sector of the economy – agriculture – can actually have an even larger impact on another – tourism. Worse, until you put stress on to a system, you do not know how those linkages operate or when they might break.And there, from an economic point of view, lies the greatest concern of all: will the stresses put on to travel and tourism put so much strain on other parts of the world economy that the recovery that is widely expected in the second half of next year be aborted?Some simple arithmetic. If travel and tourism is just over 10 per cent of the world economy and if it is down by 10 per cent as a result of the combination of catastrophes noted above, the world loses 1 per cent of its output. In a good year that might not matter, for it would just imply rather slower growth. Next year it could be the difference between a world economy that manages to inch forward and one that is in outright recession.Just about every day growth forecasts are being revised downwards: we have just had the Japanese authorities at last admitting what all of the rest of us knew: that the world’s second largest economy would decline this year.