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EK to Decommission 50%+ of Airbus A380, Axe 1/2 of Pilots & Cabin Crew

Middle East Many expats still flying in Knoteetingham. Regional issues can be discussed here.

EK to Decommission 50%+ of Airbus A380, Axe 1/2 of Pilots & Cabin Crew

Old 4th Feb 2021, 12:45
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Originally Posted by nervous_novice
Rather sweep roads than do corporate flying, but do keep us up to date in your escapades. I’ll be checking pprune for regular updates.
The most fun I ever had was during my corporate days. The job satisfaction and sense of camaraderie with colleagues is hard to beat.
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Old 4th Feb 2021, 18:20
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Return to EK

Well, since we are on the subject..

I was made redundant last month & the only reason i would ever go back to EK is if they come first (food on the table argument).

Otherwise.. any LCC in Europe with half of my ek salary would be enough to stick up the middle finger

Try to enjoy your break guys, we’ll be back flying at some point anyway!
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Old 4th Feb 2021, 23:49
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Unfortunately not everyone will be back flying soon . As well as selective recall it at all ! Sad situation for most . Again, good luck to those made redundant/ culled / fired/chopped whatever you want to call it .
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Old 5th Feb 2021, 02:08
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After EK I flew wide body VIP now Search and Rescue in a corporate jet in the safest country in the world with a lifestyle unimaginable to most airline pilots.
It's not all about the money. Enjoy your life while you still can.
As for Dubai, good riddance.
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Old 5th Feb 2021, 03:10
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been in the gulf for many years , I am not EK but thought to share this with other fellow pilots, all the best to all of us


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...premium-europe
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Old 5th Feb 2021, 05:40
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Mister Warning

What’s the safest country in the world?
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Old 5th Feb 2021, 06:21
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What’s the country that has minimal openness and doesn’t toss you out like last night’s garbage because you are a great pilot but you took a few too many legitimate sick days?

I can clearly name one. And arrogant knowing a few of us will probably accept the new T&C coming

Our colleagues on another pond in neighbouring country is facing that. In my humble opinion, let’s talk about how many of us are still left at EK and how many are surviving with the new added restrictions.

Above is clearly mentioned, 7 good years till our beloved 2019 comes back. Who even said 2019 was that great but alas 2020 showed us the door
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Old 5th Feb 2021, 06:22
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30 seconds trawl through his recent posts would suggest he is an austronaut. So to continue with the (attempted) humorous tone I would remind him that New Zealand, at least using Covid metrics, might be a bit safer.
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Old 5th Feb 2021, 06:46
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...verseas-travel

I believe this Bloomberg article is closer to reality, predicts longhaul returning in a meaninful way in 2023-2024.

Previous article posted is quite misleading because is based on today’s vaccination rates and we’re all hoping for a big increase.

In any case, not great news. By then, many 380s will be gone and redundants would have been too long away from flying or employed elsewhere.

Last edited by aussiefarmer; 5th Feb 2021 at 06:57.
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Old 5th Feb 2021, 07:32
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Thank you for sharing this, it’s very relevant article
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Old 5th Feb 2021, 12:10
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aussiefarmer

can you please copy and paste that article here, can’t read due to pay wall
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Old 5th Feb 2021, 12:26
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  • Long-haul flying may not properly resume until 2023 or 2024
  • Lobbying by airlines for vaccine passports yet to convince WHO
As coronavirus vaccines started rolling out late last year, there was a palpable sense of excitement. People began browsing travel websites and airlines grew optimistic about flying again. Ryanair Holdings Plc even launched a “Jab & Go” campaign alongside images of 20-somethings on holiday, drinks in hand.

It’s not working out that way.

For a start, it isn’t clear the vaccines actually stop travelers spreading the disease, even if they’re less likely to catch it themselves. Neither are the shots proven against the more-infectious mutant strainsthat have startled governments from Australia to the U.K. into closing, rather than opening, borders. An ambitious push by carriers for digital health passports to replace the mandatory quarantines killing travel demand is also fraught with challenges and has yet to win over the World Health Organization.

This bleak reality has pushed back expectations of any meaningful recovery in global travel to 2022. That may be too late to save the many airlines with only a few months of cash remaining. And the delay threatens to kill the careers of hundreds of thousands of pilots, flight crew and airport workers who’ve already been out of work for close to a year. Rather than a return to worldwide connectivity -- one of the economic miracles of the jet era -- prolonged international isolation appears unavoidable.
It’s very important for people to understand that at the moment, all we know about the vaccines is that they will very effectively reduce your risk of severe disease,” said Margaret Harris, a WHO spokesperson in Geneva. “We haven’t seen any evidence yet indicating whether or not they stop transmission.”To be sure, it’s possible a travel rebound will happen on its own -- without the need for vaccine passports. Should jabs start to drive down infection and death rates, governments might gain enough confidence to roll back quarantines and other border curbs, and rely more on passengers’ pre-flight Covid-19 tests.

The United Arab Emirates, for example, has largely done away with entry restrictions, other than the need for a negative test. While U.K. regulators banned Ryanair’s “Jab & Go” ad as misleading, the discount airline’s chief Michael O’Leary still expects almost the entire population of Europe to be inoculated by the end of September. “That’s the point where we are released from these restrictions,” he said. “Short-haul travel will recover strongly and quickly.”

For now though, governments broadly remain skittish about welcoming international visitors and rules change at the slightest hint of trouble. Witness Australia, which slammed shut its borders with New Zealand last month after New Zealand reported one Covid-19 case in the community.



New Zealand and Australia, which have pursued a successful approach aimed at eliminating the virus, have both said their borders won’t fully open this year. Travel bubbles, meanwhile, such as one proposed between the Asian financial hubs of Singapore and Hong Kong, have yet to take hold. France on Sunday tightened rules on international travel while Canada is preparing to impose tougher quarantine measures.

“Air traffic and aviation is really way down the priority list for governments,” said Phil Seymour, president and head of advisory at U.K-based aviation services firm IBA Group Ltd. “It’s going to be a long haul out of this.”

The pace of vaccine rollouts is another sticking point.

While the rate of vaccinations has improved in the U.S. -- the world’s largest air-travel market before the virus struck -- inoculation programs have been far from aviation’s panacea. In some places, they’re just one more thing for people to squabble about. Vaccine nationalism in Europe has dissolved into a rows over supply and who should be protected first. The region is also fractured over whether a jab should be a ticket to unrestricted travel.

It all means a rebound in passenger air traffic “is probably a 2022 thing,” according to Joshua Ng, Singapore-based director at Alton Aviation Consultancy. Long-haul travel may not properly resume until 2023 or 2024, he predicts. The International Air Transport Association said this week that in a worst-case scenario, passenger traffic may only improve by 13% this year. Its official forecast for a 50% rebound was issued in December.



American Airlines Group Inc. on Wednesday warned 13,000 employees they could be laid off, many of them for the second time in six months.

At the end of 2020 “we fully believed that we would be looking at a summer schedule where we’d fly all of our airplanes and need the full strength of our team,” Chief Executive Officer Doug Parker and President Robert Isom told workers. “Regrettably, that is no longer the case.”

The lack of progress is clear in the skies. Commercial flights worldwide as of Feb. 1 wallowed at less than half pre-pandemic levels, according to OAG Aviation Worldwide Ltd. Scheduled services in major markets including the U.K., Brazil, Spain are still falling, the data show.


Quarantines that lock up passengers upon arrival for weeks on end remain the great enemy of a real travel rebound. A better alternative, according to IATA, is a digital Travel Pass to store passengers’ vaccine and testing histories, allowing restrictions to be lifted. Many of the world’s largest airlines have rolled out apps from IATA and others, including Singapore Airlines Ltd., Emirates and British Airways.

“We need to be working on as many options as possible,” said Richard Treeves, British Airways’ head of business resilience. “We’re hopeful for integration on those apps and common standards.”

But even IATA recognizes there’s no guarantee every state will adopt its Travel Pass right away, if at all. There’s currently no consensus on vaccine passports within the 27-member European Union, with tourism-dependent countries like Greece and Portugal backing the idea and bigger members including France pushing back.

“We’re going to have a lack of harmony at the beginning,” Nick Careen, IATA’s senior vice president for passenger matters, said at a briefing last month. “None of it is ideal.”


The airline group has called on the WHO to determine that it is safe for inoculated people to fly without quarantining, in a bid to bolster the case for Travel Pass. But the global health body remains unmoved.

“At this point, all we can do is say, yes, you were vaccinated on this date with this vaccine and you had your booster -- if it’s a two-course vaccine -- on this date,” the WHO’s Harris said. “We’re working very hard to get a secure electronic system so people have that information. But at this point, that’s all it is. It’s a record.”

A vaccine passport wouldn’t be able to demonstrate the quality or durability of any protective immunity gleaned from being inoculated, or from being infected with virus naturally, either, Harris said.

The idea that your natural immunity should be protective and that you could somehow use this as a way of saying ‘I’m good to travel’ is out completely.”

Doubts around vaccines mean aviation’s top priority should be a standardized testing regime, said IBA’s Seymour. This might involve a coronavirus test 72 hours before departure, 24 hours of isolation on arrival, and then another test before being released.

“If this was the world standard, then I think we would all be prepared to start picking holidays and fly away,” he said.

Source: Bloomberg News
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Old 5th Feb 2021, 23:49
  #1393 (permalink)  
 
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Once a pair of countries have achieved an adequate level of vaccination of their populations, they will be able to open up to each other. A vaccinated traveller with a negative COVID test is unlikely to spread the virus on arrival in a country with a +70% vaccination rate. The odds of him catching the virus after his jab, testing negative and then managing to infect someone else who has also been vaccinated and having them go onto get seriously ill or die must be minute. Some countries may even be desperate enough to allow vaccinated arrivals before their own population has received the jab, Thailand is looking at a partial opening in September as the consequences of second washed out tourist season are dire.

The Israeli data showing a 0.04% infection rate after the second dose and a 0.002 hospitalisation rate is very encouraging.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-exit-pandemic

The risk level would be acceptable to allow a gradual, regulated and monitored opening up of borders. We won't get 100% elimination of COVID, it's something we will have to live with. Annual jabs, increased hygiene standards, testing and social distancing will be the new normal for the foreseeable future. Online verification of vaccination status wouldn't be difficult with governments maintaining a database and allowing airlines access to it.

Unfortunately for hub airlines, the new travel arrangements will favour point to point flights and smaller aircraft. Mixing of travellers during enroute connections will be avoided and the numbers involved won't be filling the new generation of VLAs anytime soon. A B787 from Europe direct to Bangkok will be happening well before a connecting flight using A380s via the Middle East is a realistic proposition.

AIDS has been with us for the last 40 years and was a virtual death sentence back in the 1980s but we learned to live with the problem, every country has 1000s of people infected but travellers aren't generally tested unless permanent migration is involved.
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Old 6th Feb 2021, 02:07
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I agree. All countries will want to control more stringently the pax' departure country/region in order to determine what protection measures to apply. Once an intermediate stop is involved, meaning meddling with other pax from multiple departure points, this is logically void and the most strict measure will be applied. Not very attractive.
AAR's dream of all 380s flying this fall will need a miracle.
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Old 6th Feb 2021, 04:44
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Valid point.

AAR TCTC can fly the A380 provided whatever pilots are left can do so and that they are ok with being pretty much all empty

As per company wide messaging, even the dragon mart vaccine (only one available in the country) is being given to EK employees but every western national including Macron who went on the record to say the sinopharm can create more new strains as it hasn’t been tested enough!!!!

Yet memo states “it shouldn’t be an issue” as apparently as long as you have an inoculation you are ok. But that’s also incorrect, as posted above, WHO isn’t buying into the whole digital passport bogus.
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Old 6th Feb 2021, 06:55
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Originally Posted by krismiler
Unfortunately for hub airlines, the new travel arrangements will favour point to point flights and smaller aircraft. Mixing of travellers during enroute connections will be avoided and the numbers involved won't be filling the new generation of VLAs anytime soon. A B787 from Europe direct to Bangkok will be happening well before a connecting flight using A380s via the Middle East is a realistic proposition.
I disagree. Weak demand between mid size city pairs at the beginning of the recovery is more likely to favour the hub concept. There will be some exceptions like the one you mentioned but, in general, demand aggregators like EK's model will be able to get operations much quicker and with much smaller risk. Evidence shows that even at the worst time of covid in terms of restrictions, a stop in a connecting hub had no effect in where you could travel to or from, provided the recipient country would allow you in.
Originally Posted by krismiler
Once a pair of countries have achieved an adequate level of vaccination of their populations, they will be able to open up to each other. A vaccinated traveller with a negative COVID test is unlikely to spread the virus on arrival in a country with a +70% vaccination rate.
I have the same views as you on this, I am not sure WHO and majority of countries agree on it though. It just takes a single passenger with a single variant that renders the jabs ineffective enough and then the whole concept crumbles. How likely that is, I have no idea.
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Old 7th Feb 2021, 02:00
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Echo - Sinopharm vaccine does not appear to be the only one available in Dubai -

https://www.timeoutdubai.com/news/45...bi-and-sharjah
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Old 7th Feb 2021, 04:20
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"TCTC" that would be TCST to you....I cant see which airlines are going to have enough bug smashers to fly point to point with the frequency needed to generate meaningful levels of revenue. The major airlines with large aircraft ie 777s and 380s are the only ones that will be able to meet the huge demand when the doors open.

In relation to the miss managed vaccine rollout, whatever you take is a risk and only time will tell which one wins the race in the long run. Let us be thankful that our administrators don't fly our aircraft.


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Old 7th Feb 2021, 05:55
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Your statement in gods ears, but it is only an assumption at this very moment. The "huge demand" you sort of imply as given has three problems: Will it materialise? And if, when? Finally, will these major airlines have the legs to wait?
Would you want to place your money or career on this kind of bet?
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Old 8th Feb 2021, 07:08
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So aside from last week’s round of CC layoffs, are pilots getting spared this week?
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