We are starting to see the tremors turn into an earthquake.
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Unemployment figures have just jumped with 227,000 jobs lost in May and the rate of unemployment reaching 7.1 per cent, the highest it's been since 2001.
And now the Qantas bombshell, with at least 6,000 jobs to go.
It's the change of direction which is so startling - the equivalent of the call from the cabin to adopt the brace position when a crash is on the way.
The airline is looking to the post-covid world whenever that may be and hunkering down in the hope that it will be around when mass flying resumes.
Chief Executive Alan Joyce reckons there'll be no resumption of international flights in the next twelve months and few would doubt him.
He may even be optimistic. The International Air Transport Association reckons that the industry's revenues might get back to pre-crisis 2019 levels in three years.
It should be said, though, that there is a more optimistic view, too. Dr Volodymyr Bilotkach, author of "The Economics of Airlines" told this paper that after the disruptions of 2001 and 2008, passenger numbers recovered very quickly.
And growth was so swift that within a few years, there were more people working in the industry than there had been before the crises.
The true shock of the announcement comes in the realisation that this thing - the Thing - is not nearly on its way to being over.
Figures for infections have been coming down, with the experts not showing undue alarm even about the spike in Melbourne. It was nice to think that normality was on its way.
But it is not. The worst of the health crisis may have been averted in that those make-shift emergency hospitals weren't needed. The system wasn't overwhelmed - as it has been in other countries.
But now comes the economic crisis, with Qantas blowing the first blast of icy wind in our faces.
Canberra Airport chief executive Stephen Byron amplified the fears, saying that more job losses are on the way. He partly blamed state governments for not opening borders.
Smaller airlines means smaller airports and businesses in airports. There is a significant aviation manufacturing sector in Australia, both making parts for civilian aircraft and servicing them.
The question is what will be left when the virus crisis is over, presumably only when a vaccine emerges (and that is a year or even two away, according to the ANU's Professor Peter Collignon).
Qantas is aiming to stash away the cash for when it emerges. It aims to cut $15 billion from its costs over the next three years.
Will it be enough?
Nobody knows, particularly as big travel markets like the United States seem so far from getting a grip on it.
As Mr Joyce's pilots might say: "Brace, brace, brace!"