The Death of British Aviation
 

Apologies for the dramatic title, but it may not be much of an exaggeration.

The media have featured nothing but doom pronouncements on layoffs and airline closures.

Why has there been zero support for our critical industry from either the Transport Minister, Grant Shapps, or his junior underling the Aviation Minister, Kelly Tolhurst?

More importantly, what can we take as a professional group to help stop the rot before it is too late? I fear many pilots, engineers, crew, and office staff will never work for an airline again. This is a tragedy.

You raise an interesting point.
Just when folk in Aviation should be working together in the UK to lobby Government, the ability of people to fight each other knows no bounds!
For instance, BA's BALPA reps are having a battle between the long serving pilots and the shorter service ones. BA's BASSA crew branch are battling with BA's MF crew branch, and their overall TU is trying to do away with their jobs completely by asking the Government to take away BA's slots - which will go to Foreign airlines.

No, Aviation just cannot work together for the greater good.

Personal self interest Rules OK!!!

Interesting behaviour given the industries penchant for CRM & Human Factors.

AO, you might want to call it "self interest" but perhaps in these times it's "self survival".

BoJo and his lot are far too scared to be seen to support what has become the scapegoat for all environmental criticism.

If this happened 10 or 20 years ago there would have been far more help.

However this is now the age of XR, Twitter and Greta. What party would want to upset the keyboard warriors by financially supporting the perceived demonic industry of the airline industry?

This unfortunately is a perfect storm for some.

That's very true the environmental lobby has definitely played a role in suffocating the chances of large amounts of aid to the UK aviation sector.

I wonder if the environment lobby will start to get even more upset when there are very few or no aircraft around when They want to go on holiday?

Infighting isn't going to help anyone; BALPA et al need to present a coherent case to government for support to those folk who have been impacted financially.
​​​​​​The majority of holidays are taken in Europe/North Africa, LCC 's are better placed to respond to demand. IMO, if you want to go on holiday, flights will be there.
Aviation isn't alone in taking a massive hit, this is unprecedented and across the board; aviation will recover although we're talking years, not months.
Think about the consequences for commercial and retail property, I believe that these will take infinitely longer to recover, probably never reaching previous levels.
Might also want to thinks about pension funds exposure to Covid19 impacted funds

I got a month ban for pointing out that our pathetic politicians are in thrall to climate change activists and in particular the teenage wunderkid from Sweden. The bonkers reality we now find ourselves in as professional pilots is indeed to witness the decline of our incredible industry. Political correctness is lapped up by generally spineless politicians and a supine media. The vast majority of them and the aforementioned climate change warriors are in the main not educated scientifically and generally have zero understanding of scientific or engineering principles. I include the graduates from Oxbridge etc. I doubt whether most of them could explain the inner workings of the internal combustion engine. Sometimes you get the same stuff here as the professional pilot part of pprune appears to be disappearing at great speed. It’s a real shame.

My tuppence worth is the General public's arse has collapsed,they have swallowed this Covid garbage hook line and sinker.Over 200 countries have this virus installed in their territory,some idiots think that's containment, and we are still having travel bans.Just completed my 16th day of quarantine,I gave them a couple of bonus days due to the crap weather here in the UK.Maybe I shall just go to Havana!

The Human race can't work together for the greater good.

Perhaps the reason for that is that the population density for the human species is too high. There are too many on the planet?

Time to face facts
 

The aviation industry will not rebound from this in the way everyone on this forum is hoping. That is the reason airlines aren’t being bailed out by the government - they’d rather throw good money after bad somewhere the public actually cares about rather than lose their shirt on an industry that they want to phase down - for many reasons, not least the environmental ones (that the public ‘cares’ about). Why won’t it bounce back? Because business customers (like me) have found a different, more convenient and cheaper way of working online. Having flown around the globe several times on business trips (with large teams of people filling the seats and costing a fortune) I can’t imagine ever having to do it again...and for that I am profoundly grateful. Will I fly on business? Probably - down from 10 - 15 long hauls per year to zero and the same amount of short hauls to just a handful. Everything else can be done online. Will I still want to go on holiday? Yes, but not if prices sky-rocket to compensate. The aviation industry is on a cliff edge...thank you for taking care of me and my fellow travellers...but now it’s time for you to take care of yourselves and your families.

I see it that he wants to come across as strong in the fight against the virus, pulling out all the stops etc.

Of course this is all in the hope that people will forget his foolish behavior at the start of the pandemic that involved gloating about going into a hospital with COVID patients and shaking everyone's hand.

He is more than willing to sacrifice UK aviation if it means saving votes.

U.K. aviation can never recover with these insane last minute knee jerk quarantines - how can anyone book reliably for holiday or a work trip ?

Stop blaming your local politicians. Look instead at the source of the real problem. Are you helping to 'feed' it? Or are you actively doing your bit to starve it? Or are you just sitting and whinging?

Don’t be under any illusion it would have been better with another party in power. Look at the heavily Lib Dem Labour cross party report. Your quarantine on return you’ll be in a specific hotel under observation! Aviation would be in a far bigger mess.

There are many factors at work here, not least of which is the dawning realisation of the public that in aviation at least, it is much better to arrive than travel. Does anybody actually enjoy flying? Passengers and pilots seem to agree that it’s not fun anymore and hasn’t been for a looong time. Up until now there were no alternatives, however, in the non-aviation corporate world, non-flying and the alternative of remote working are ‘taking-off’ (apologies) in a big way, driven by cost savings and a real lack of desire with the decision makers (purse string holders) to get on a plane. Yes, you’ll still have the holidaymakers but businesses have grounded themselves (largely), for good (...or bad, depending on your perspective). Sadly there is now massive over-capacity for the foreseeable...and that means scaling down. It’s pure economics, the ‘eco-warriors’ are just sitting on the sidelines feeling a bit smug. The aviation industry will survive of course and perhaps it will be ‘fun‘ once again...just on a fraction of the scale today.

Well if you had done any research, you would have seen that is not true.

" British carriers

British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair have all taken advantage of the COVID Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF) set up by the Bank of England. British Airways received £300 million ($374 million) while Ryanair received £600 million ($749 million). easyJet has accessed GBP £600 million ($750m) from the same source."

This is from simpleflying.com but I cannot post the full link.

Since all the airlines are still there, how do you think government money would have changed matters ? You are presumably not asking for money to pay everybody until the industry is back to 100%, so what is the realistic situation that you would want now ?