It works, although it may be of less benefit if its right through your community already...

Australia brought in 14 quarantine here, just in the nick of time too. Most cases are from international travel returning. Very little community transmission here, luckily.

Currently, pax in and outbound restricted to essential and compassionate, sent to government hotels for 14 days. Aircrew can self isolate at home for 14 days, or until the next flight.

I'm lucky enough to be self isolating between flights.

Apart from the short term effect of killing off Virgin Atlantic, these restrictions will cause enormous damage to the rest of the UK air transport industry. The quarantine restriction seems to be aimed at stopping the virus being 'seeded' again by asymptomatic people arriving from other countries. Logically it will have to be applied until a mass vaccination programme has been completed, even if no new cases have been reported in the UK for several weeks. If an effective vaccine is not found, what then?

Mr Mac that is definitely in line with the current rules that I have just checked. But if you decide to remain in Germany as you suggested earlier then you could well be required to work from 'home' in Germany for 14 days. I am sure your legal department will be on top of this. What is clear though is that the UK is pretty late to the party with restrictions on international travel. The Gisaid website with its timelapse virus mutations demonstrates how Covid spread by plane and probably why London and New York are the worst effected places on the planet.

I can imagine Mr Walsh was very keen to influence any consultation. Pick a date when you plan to start up again then encourage HMG to introduce restrictions to prevent the competition getting one step ahead. I can imagine it will all be lifted on 01 July.

Having operated several times at LHR during the lockdown I was surprised that no screening of any description was taking place. The technology is available with large TV screens measuring temperatures along with a form to fill out. Yes it take time but worth it in my view.
Have we learnt nothing from previous outbreaks that threaten the world?
I was in Sierra Leone when the Ebola virus was in its early stages and on leaving the country forms had to be filled out and temperature taken and for arrivals as well. Ebola was virtually contained within west Africa .
i know the symptoms are different with Covid19, but I think we have been far too slow to react to screening pax.
I agree this is a major blow to our industry and a government bailout is now needed to save the UK aviation industry

https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4...-post-covid-19

”Germany, like the UK and many other major economies around the world, has been under mounting pressure from business leaders, green groups, think tanks, and economists to resist the urge to rebuild coronavirus-hit economies in carbon-intensive ways, and in the short-term avoid bailing out polluting sectors, such as aviation, without stringent environmental conditions attached.”

From what I’m reading of the Petersberg Climate Dialogue at the end of April, it sounds like multiple governments want to tie covid recovery with green issues, it might go some way to explain the government seemingly wanting to damage mass commercial air transport.

“”The harder the lockdown the faster it passes, the UK gov have been lax and incompetent, perhaps intentionally (i.e. they are murderers), so it'll last longer and cost more lives and to the economy . . . whether you voted for a smart *rse latin talking chimp who is absolutely incapable of dealing with this (or any other) issue, only you will know . . . if you did . . . chapeau . . . you get what you asked for . . .“”


extraordinary rant!


its doubtful any government could have done much better than this given the lack of readiness that ALL governments are guilty of. We do largely get the politicians we deserve as those who speak bluntly with hard truths don’t get elected.
warnings of such virus’s have been made and talked about for decades in the scientific community but nobody in power ( or the public at large)took any notice.
In particular , our insistence on travelling anywhere without taking the blindest bit of notice about its effects or potential to spread such a virus has been a major factor .

there were major international protocols agreed in 2008 following SARS to cope with this but governments throughout the world threw the rule book out of the window , probably out of a mixture of panic ( helped along as ever by sensationalist press, uncontrolled crap on social media and a largely scientifically uneducated population) and unpreparedness as soon as a real pandemic hit.

In the U.K. , in particular, we have happily moved our manufacturing base abroad ( hence a lack of PPE and chemicals available for testing kits easily to hand) but we have an amazing health system so it’s not surprising the government prioritised that, especially after seeing Italy’s very modern system on the brink of collapse.

As for the issue in this thread, it raises many questions so we’ll have to wait for the detail but it’s possible that it helps to prevent ‘re-seeding’ the virus. It is also possible the government sees it as a way of permanently cutting aviation to meet climate targets - something which is pointless of course if it’s not done internationally. It certainly will help wipe out a large part of the aviation industry if it’s not financially mitigated against.

At the end of this there will either be a vaccine, medicines to mitigate the virus’s effects or enough herd immunity so that the virus becomes just another disease that we routinely accept kills several thousand older people each year, as in flu, until the next one comes along.

Theres no way aviation can carry on as it was before this as it plays a critical part in spreading such diseases so probably health checks, temp scans etc etc will be with us permanently, as in the security procedures after 9/11 and perhaps a permanent reduction in flying may not be a bad thing from an environmental impact point of view. ( separate debate)

The answer should be to protect the most vulnerable and get the rest back into work but as a politician you then have to tell over 70’s ( for example) to stay indoors and then answer the people who lose somebody younger so back to the top, there’s no point in ranting and criticising everything the government dies as none of us could do any better given our political system


Read a book ... ‘ how contagion works’. By Paulo Giordini - it helps explain the conundrum we’re in

Given that “key workers” are likely to be exempted and, at the moment, are probably are the overwhelming number of people travelling by air (don’t think there are many holidaymakers), then how does quarantining a small fraction of those on a flight do anything at all?

Totally inept UK Gov,peopled with utter wallies , as usual, way beyond the drag curve. Stacks of views all over the place highlighting what other Governments did. UK just followed but too little too late. Here's a further example but, hey, we elected the clots ! Allusion to the notion that the UK Gov knows exactly what is going on and in the case of Border Control, LACK of control , was justifiably criminal, has been blind sided or heavily edited. Why ? It is not hindsight. Lack of appropriate action led to these predictable results.

My biggest laugh of the day was the Gov suggesting that screening of inbound pax at LHR was of a small proportion to those already infected and would therefore be, pointless. Daily briefings by plonkers like Hancock steered towards the numbers game. Percentage of this, proportion of that, a few graphs. Most listening would be yawning ,lost, or both.

When I was being groomed for a roll in Training, I expressed concern with having to deal with very difficult questions sometimes posed by Trainees. I was told to just fob them off with the numbers game, stats & graphs ! I don't recall Johnson, Hancock & the other wasters being in the group with me but goodness gracious, these guys are good !

Not quite so many laughing at the idea of collusion, NWO ( rather than the biggots in the WHO) and the complete con of tracing APPS on your "smart" phone. Wake up people.

FullWings

yep, agree with your observation about who is flying in/out of the UK by air at the moment..

It looked (well until this rumour started) as if some airlines were looking at starting to rebuild their short haul programmes in a very limited way perhaps from July onwards - if any quarantine is announced that applies to everybody ( not just those those arriving from outside Europe) then I suspect those plans will go back on ice and TBH I'm then not sure how any UK based airline can ride this out.

Still, I expect those with a financial interest in Butlins, Pontins, Centre Parcs etc will be happy........

Really??? How about telling people not to go to pubs and restaurants but not forcing those places to close down. How did that work out? Same with getting adults to self distance to stop the spread but keeping the schools open for all. Yet another late U turn there. We watched this virus coming and did nothing. We should have acted 6 weeks earlier when we would have had less trouble sourcing PPE and testing kits. We might have found ourselves in a better position than S Korea, Germany, Greece etc. Our governments incompetence has cost thousands of lives.

Of the 3 people I know that have died from Covid-19, 2 were under 55 with no underlying health conditions, but both worked worked in public transport enviroment and were subjected to high viral load conditions over a period of many days prior to lockdown.
All public transportation will be affected by this in the coming 18 months, not just aviation, but sadly, UK Govt are not interested in supporting aviation as it's after the green vote, so will happily cast it aside. Don't forget Boris stated he would lay down in front of the bulldozers of a 3rd runway at LHR, which is why HMG said in Jan they would not be appealing the court decision on LHR expansion. If this virus is with us for ever, the money being pumped into HS2 will be even more of a white elephant than many predicted before this virus took hold as no one will be using it!
The only way this virus will be eradicated outside a lab, will be to deny it human host for long enough......that means all countries isolating themselves until zero community transmission occurs for 21 days at least.
My job at Heathrow was terminated a month ago, and its highly unlikely I will ever work there or in aviation again.

Too little too late. Are there any pax flights still arriving or has the govt missed the boat?

"Figures released to Labour MP Stephen Doughty showed that fewer than 300 people arriving in the UK were quarantined in the run-up to coronavirus lockdown on 23 March. The Home Office figures showed that just 273 of about 18.1 million arrivals had to spend time in isolation in the first three months of the year, including passengers on three planes from Wuhan, the centre of the initial outbreak in China.

The BBC reported on Friday night that aviation minister Kelly Tolhurst is expected to discuss the proposals with airline and airport representatives in a conference call on Saturday morning."

From The Guardian today.

What about operating crew of international flights on a overnight layover?

It seems that there are some more issues that governments (and some industries) would like to push in the wake and in the shadow of Covid:
Mandatory tracking of individuals via smartphones, abandoning cash money, climate agenda and compulsory vaccination come to my mind. Certainly, there would be more.

The Telegraph, Times and others baying for the impossible and picking out the incompetence of the pre lockdown Government policies? They are really left wing rags "Not!" The Daily Mail is the worst for Sh*te stirring. If people can catch Covid, they will not fly unless totally essential. I saw that with the foot fall drop off in late Feb and early Marchon the fly prog system for my lot.

So we’re going to have a mock-consultation with the airlines to “discuss” their de-facto shutdown. What’s the logic in restricting access from areas with much lower rates than UK and is there any evidence that doing so will help?

I also see that questions are being raised as to the credibility of Prof. Ferguson’s software as it appears to be ridden with bugs and gives different answers depending on the computer it is run on. The post flight review of this crisis is going to be worth reading.

I would like to see the reasoning behind this suggestion as it seems a very odd time to bring these restrictions in. We are currently seeing a fall in cases and death rates, the NHS was never overwhelmed (the original case for bringing in the lockdown), we never ran out of ventilators and currently 40% of critical care beds in the NHS are empty. I would have thought that now would be the time to relax restrictions, not increase them.