EK flights are seeing good passenger numbers on some regular services (200+) let alone what's in the hold.

If people are flying "outbound" surely they can only be repatriation home?

One of the largest problems to unravelling this will surely be travel insurance ?

Even if we sort of social distancing will companies provide insurance to cover Covid ?

How for example will LHR, MAN etc revert to mass transit without that in place.

https://travelweekly.co.uk/articles/...rance-policies

Insurance would indeed appear to be a problem.
Anything can be insured at a price but that price (at least initially) might not be attractive. For the higher risk groups who previously paid higher premiums as they were statistically more likely to suffer from health issues, it might not be financially practical to travel, potentially until a vaccine is developed.
For the business traveler, that cost will be borne by the companies they work for but if excessive, may initially make continued use of video conferencing more appealing in some instances.
Hopefully a clearer picture on the way forward will appear after the government sets out its plans at weekend

LHR has been seeing 200-250 daily movements (arrivals+departures) for the last week or so. I don't know why the BBC is quoting "60 daily arrivals" as to date it has never been that low.

I think the BBC are rightly quoting the passenger carrying flights and not those rather many “passenger aircraft and flight numbered “ freighting flights operating at the moment

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...mpression=true

.....the won't even need two runways the way things are going!

So LHR is testing temperatures for those DEPARTING for destinations that require and are planning to do this for ALL departing pax?

Are they still not testing arriving pax? We all know that temperature is not a single golden rule but it is a starting point.

Now that they don't have to bother about R3, perhaps they can focus on this.

Fabulous post, well thought out with amazing insight. Perhaps they’ll build some nice houses at T4 and expand Feltham? I hear holidays and travel are never coming back ever ever ever?

I suspect the poster simply forgot to add a smiley. :O

Yes, it's an exaggeration, of course. But, given that very few of the world's passenger air routes are going to be capable of being operated economically until a Covid-19 vaccine is widely available and social distancing is a thing of the past, it's anybody's guess as to when LHR flight volumes will begin to approach even pre-Covid LGW levels, let alone necessitate the use of two runways at the same time.

Still, HAL's weekly runway alternation, as well as providing respite for local communities, is presumably helping to keep the tumbleweed at bay.

I'm glad DR at least recognised the irony :).

Skip by way of balance Manchester is in the same boat .

someone was saying it took years to recover from 911 and 2008............

It will take months and years for many UK airports to recover, if ever. Some will close.
London however has LHR/LGW/LTN/STN/LCY which will see any recovery more prominent at some than others. Depending on the slot allocation rules on a use it or lose it basis, the market should re-align towards LHR at the expense of the others. That won’t change.

TUI 787
 

For those interested, G-TUII TUI Dreamliner is inbound to Heathrow. Assume a repatriation flight however will be the first time seeing TUI at Heathrow. ETA 08:30

TUI aircraft have visited LHR several times

Today between 5am and 11.30am I saw 52 flights going into LHR, they all seemed to be passenger aircraft, surely they cannot all be repatriation, cargo flights ? Or is this a sign that air travel is trying to re-start. By comparison my local airport Edinburgh (nothing compared to Heathrow in size or capacity I admit) only saw 3 passenger flights ! during the same time period

They were:-
BA..... JFK x3, Washington, Nairobi, Chicago x3, Miami, Toronto, LAX, Atlanta, San Fransisco, Dallas, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Aberdeen
Aegean..... Athens
Aer Lingus.... Belfast, Dublin
Air Canada.... Toronto x2, Vancouver
Air China..... Shanghai
Air India.... Delhi
Air Malta.....Luqa
Alitalia.....Rome
American Airlines.....Dallas, Miami
Cathay Pacific.... Hong Kong
ELAL......Tel Aviv
Emirates..... Dubai
Etihad.....Abu Dhabi
Eurowings.... Dusseldorf
Finnair.... Helsinki
Gulf Air..... Bahrain
KLM..... Amsterdam
Lufthansa.....Frankfurt
Qatar..... Doha x3
Swiss... Zurich
THY....Istanbul
United..... JFK, Chicago x2
Virgin..... JFK x3

The vast majority of these flights are passenger aircraft with zero passengers on board operating as freighters

Depending on the day there are 9000-15000 passengers arriving on flights into LHR, most of those airlines quoted are pax carrying, some with 200+ onboard. In fact the other day I counted 213 coming off an EK flight.

Qantas's non-stop from Perth is also still operating, albeit only weekly (on Mondays). Today's landed at about 05:50.

If you really need to know which are freighters, 'thebasource.com' and 'thevssource.com' are good pointers of those respective fleets

Emirates are operating a single odd day flight with inbound passengers ONLY. All others are freight with passenger aircraft and all outbound Nil passengers at the moment.

Yes BA/IB/EI are operating a very limited scheduled of close EU and one or two Domestics .

No US flights are carrying passengers period

El-AL are operating a very ad-hoc service primarily freight however there is some traffic (Israelis ) back to Tel- Aviv - subject to very strict 14 day self isolation on entry

THY- Turkish are ALL freight on passenger aircraft

And lets just get real an airport the size and importance of Heathrow to the national economy 15,000 is an exceptionally small amount - To use metaphor it equates to somewhere like Liverpools typical traffic levels.