I don't know why I bother really.

LTNman

So cruise ships and companies have stopped, they will not be spreading the virus anymore then. If aviation did the same they would not be spreading it either. Did'nt the first case in the UK come in by AIR ? Lets all be honest the virus has not got legs it does not spread itself. It has to travel by human interaction, we take it everywhere, so why did aviation not shut down just like shipping.

I am pro aviation (pilot) but cannot undertand why passengers need to fly around the world at present, holidays not important, some say business meeting have to happen, rubbish rather than fly half way round the world just do it online, it would be slightly less hassle missing a nights sleep to interact with someone in a different time zone than flying 12,000 miles there and 12,000 miles back ? So if travel and interaction with others is the only way this virus is passed on is'nt the answer obvious. Only essential travel allowed for example only cargo flights and air ambulance flights.

And for those who are saying we are stupid for booking a holiday, mine was booked in July 2019 for June 2020 Cancelled and re-booked for June 2021 by TUI rather than go through the process of fighting for my money back. I will obviously re-assess the situation in the Spring of 2021 and if not safe I will not travel, but do not need politicians telling me six months from my travel date not to book anything. I just hope if Nic Sturgeon is telling Scots not to book any holidays she will not allow anyone from abroad to enter Scotland and further kill the economy. Thats my rant for the day - sorry if it offends anyone, just my view.

ericson / helipixman
I will also be travelling to South Africa at the weekend on business along with Dubai. Also before anybody mentions ********Zoom / Team meetings that is why muggins is having to bloody go the week before Christmas, after I have just got back from leave in Madeira where I am currently. If I had say £50 for every error I am finding which clients have made due to people having Zoom / Team conversations, and then all got the totally wrong end of what was discussed then I could probably retire in 2022 !

Currently myself and my staff are back in the air doing what we did pre pandemic, and yes we take all the precautions we can Lost count of tests undertaken, and its not much fun, but boy does it get results. Our sales operations have picked up enough work through the actions of our consultancy and PM side as a result of us “being gutsy enough” to quote one client, to close our book until 2023 unless we grow the company further, or indeed a client goes bust. In the latter case as we credit insure the, and will not work with them if we can not get cover, this is not an issue. So yes we will continue to do the long haul flying and meeting with our clients, the risk I would say is greater in a UK Supermarket than in an A/C judging by the figures I have seen, and indeed the numbers on some flights, though my flight down here was nearly full.

Ericson
I would say that the long haul flying experience in masks is not great. We fly business which helps but it is a long flight to SA so plenty of moisturiser I would suggest. Have a good trip.

Anybody who thinks business travel can just transfer online doesn't understand business travel. Newsflash, the internet has been around for years, and yet there were still 30+ flights a day between London and New York pre-Covid. You don't secure multi-million pound sales deals on Microsoft Teams. Aside from business travel for meetings and sales, a vast amount of people's business travel is commuting. My chiropractor commutes from Denmark, he cannot work from home.

Helipixman, just because you can't understand why people need to travel, doesn't mean that people don't need to travel. Quite frankly, it's not your place to judge people's decisions on travel. Heck, even the FCDO have a very loose description of "essential travel", and state that it's ultimately at the discretion of the traveler to decide what counts as essential. If more people would stop sticking their oar into other people's life choices, the world would probably be a happier place.

With business travel, essential is sometimes defined in terms of what rivals do.
If 3 companies are pitching for a big contract, 2 meet the client in person and the 3rd relies on Zoom, then the contract will be awarded in one way.
If all 3 companies find travelling to the client very difficult and all 3 rely on just Zoom, the contract will be awarded a very different way

Vokes55 Thank you for your post,there is still hope out there,I was beginning to lose all faith.Last Sunday I flew ACE-BFS-GLA. At BFS I showed the locator form on my phone to the border staff.Last August I flew ACE-LGW-GLA. At LGW I went through the E-Passport gate,no one asked for anything,on arrival back in GLA I went into a 14 day idiotic isolation coming from an island with 5 times less the R rate than the island where I live.I got tested negative in early November.I shall be hiring and and flying a Cessna 175 (ZS-CMT) out of Rand Airport,Johannesburg from February.I shall not stop travelling.

I travelled to Europe a few times this year. Both by road and air. No problems.
I caught COVID in the UK a couple of months ago. In the 2 weeks leading up to the symptoms I didn't go anywhere other than work (under strict COVID restrictions) and the supermarket.

Hong Kong have put a ban on British Airways until Christmas Day for flying in 4 passengers that had Covid plus a passenger who did not comply with prevention requirements.
https://ukaviation.news/british-airw...rom-hong-kong/
Meanwhile at Luton the first signs of the Christmas rush is starting with 70 flights yesterday mostly from Eastern Europe. Not sure where all these visitors will be staying when there is not meant to be any household mixing.

Considering Ryanair are currently selling a raft of flights for £5 from Eastern Europe to the UK and £150-200 from the UK to Eastern Europe, I am guessing those flights coming to the UK are rather empty.

Question then becomes how many passengers will quarantine when they come back into the U.K.? I can see why Hong Kong has so few cases but then we are a democracy.

Heathrow terminals 3 and 4, as well as Gatwick south terminal have all been closed for several months and not likely to reopen any time soon
Does anyone have a link to a video (maybe from a small drone) of the interior of these terminal in their closed state ? I'd be interested to see what they look like - all covered up with dust sheets (?), and shops shuttered, and then compare them to how I remember them from 2019

Why are you so concerned with what people are doing? Do you work for the police? Or are you just another busybody sticking your oar in to people's lives and matters that are none of your business? Did you stand at your window during the first lockdown making sure nobody left their house for more than hour too? (it's a rhetorical question, we all know the answer).

What planet are you on with that idiotic pathetic post. Has Covid affected your mind? It will concern most people who are sticking to the rules to keep this virus under some sort of control when there are people who are not so that makes it my business.

It is worth expanding this list to see where the U.K. comes out of all the destinations from Luton
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...pe-by-country/

Well only 20% of people who should be quarantining are, so I’d say it goes well beyond the Eastern European community.

LTNman

No it's not your business what people do inside or outside of their own homes. But maybe if you're that bothered, you should find some of these "Eastern European visitors" and question them in person, and see what kind of response you get.

Your constant negative assumptions and whinging is tiring. We get it, you're scared of Covid-19 and you think the world should stop until it disappears completely.

RedDragonFlyer

For my sins I work at Luton Airport and inbound numbers have considerably picked up this weekend. It is always easy to spot those that have not seen loved ones for many months or maybe a year or two by the hugging and kissing in arrivals. If I didn't know better I would never know we are in the middle of a pandemic as people don't kiss with masks on. It will be no different though to what will happen over Christmas when families here visit other family members between the 23rd and 27th but it does make a nonsense of current rules about not going inside homes you don't live in outside those dates and then there is the valid question about visitors bothering to quarantine. To say it is no ones business is fundamentally wrong as breaches will just prolong the agony and new imported cases will then start new chains of infections.

What is happening in America since Thanksgiving with its surge in cases and now 3,200 deaths each day should act as a warning as in January when Christmas and New Year passes the country will pay a high price. The Irish press is commenting on 100,000 Irish heading home for Christmas so it is easy to see how this virus spreads at speed and Luton Airport will be doing its bit to help that spread.

And how many of today’s 18,447 daily confirmed cases do you think were “imported” and how many were caught at schools, hospitals or the supermarket? As had been mentioned so many times in this thread, the virus is active in 200+ countries across the world. Somebody traveling from the UK to Ireland is somebody traveling from a place with COVID to a place with COVID. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to visit loved ones in a different country but people can visit loved ones in the same country?

A quick google search find reports from February, March, June and last week that state travel restrictions and quarantines are almost entirely pointless if a country already has community transmission of COVID.

The genetics show that our second wave was largely generated by holidaymakers returning from Spain. Until then community transmission had largely been suppressed in much of the UK.

I would suggest the seasonal nature of viruses are more likely to be the cause of the ‘second wave’.

It's certainly true that the onset of autumnal weather driving people indoors accelerated the growth of the second wave, but if it hadn't already been spreading as a result of the returning holidaymakers there wouldn't have been so many spreaders to spread it.

That's like saying all cases are imported because it originally came from China. How many of today's cases were caught abroad or directly from somebody who had caught it abroad?

So there you have it,it's all the fault of those falling off the plane from Las Americas. Marvellous.The games afoot!

During all the fuss about Nicola Sturgeon telling people not to book holidays it was reported that there was a paper submitted to SAGE that said that - I've looked for the actual paper but can't find it:https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/p...s-not-23140958

I think the SAGE paper was based on this https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...063v2.full.pdf which states "The cluster first rises in frequency in Spain, initially jumping to around 60% prevalence within a month of the first sequence being detected. In the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, and Switzerland we observe a gradual rise starting in mid-July. In Wales and Scotland the variant was at 80% by mid-September"

From the above document, it didn't help....

I stand corrected It was the Italian Riviera. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/2/20-4632_article

LTNman

Strange democracy that rules Hong Kong for 90 years via an appointed Govenor and only decided Hong Kong should have a democractic Govt when they were handing it back to its owners.

Or is this the one that has general elections where winning 43.6% of the vote gives you 56.2% of the seats in parliment.

Oh wait it is one and the same.

Link Kilo

UK lockdown ended 4th of July and people went nuts with pubs and other places open and a lets all party attitude. But lets put the blame elsewehre even when people were not travelling.

Of course your claim is all backed up by Govts track and trace on holiday makers. Oh wait.

Community care less attitude from July onwards was responsibility for increase in cases not holiday makers.

Vokes55

Same people want aviation to recover but decry people using aviation now.

Er this is always the way at Christmas, people wish to return home to see family, though of my many polish friends who normally go I reckon 5% or less will travel. Few willing to risk family either way.

Just like those here that want aviation to recover but will refuse a vaccine.

LTN
Give me the vaccine ASAP please, if it means I know longer to have so many Covid Tests for travelling (well past 30 now) and not fill out so many Govt forms. It would be great if it was like Yellow Fever Cert for vaccine. You could put it in peoples Passport which would make things easier.

Mr Mac,

I recall Matt Hancock announcing that the UK won't be introducing an official Covid-19 vaccination certificate, which to me seems plain stupid, but then why should I expect anything different from the current UK government. Perhaps getting the jab in Germany might be the best way of obtaining a certificate; they after all have a form for just about everything!!

This week at least

ATNotts
You may well be correct but it would be good if there was an international one, as I for see a form written in German causing some issues at borders around the world. Perhaps one in English / French / Chinese ? As for getting the actual Jab I have taken my que from the Flue Vaccine, and will keep options open as after many cancellations in the UK I ended up getting that in Germany as well.

Wallsendmag
As you say things do change by the day in the UK, or maybe I should say England under current leader !!

What's the point of a COVID vaccination certificate when the expiry date is unknown?

Mike current
As you say, we do not know yet officially how long the inoculation lasts, 6 months or longer. If like Yellow Fever and is a significant time, then then a certificate would be worth while for frequent travellers, as repeated test and paperwork associated are time consuming and not always easy to accommodate.

ATNotts
Same the world over due to TV / Hollywood for none native English speakers I find, though US service personnel in southern Germany also lead to and increase I think. Funny that the BAOR / RAF did not have a similar impact re accents in NW Germany.

mike current

As long as the date of the (second) vaccination is recorded on there, local border rules can state that your certificate is valid until [X Months / Years] beyond that date?

Mr Mac

So what happens when mutations occur ?