lederhosen

I would argue that fuel and noise pollution are not considerations while we are in a pandemic.

Indeed, EASA released SIB 2020-02R5 which refers to recommended covid procedures, and our (very cost sensitive) management informed the line pilots that airports have agreed APU can be used despite any environmental restrictions while the SIB is in force. This is in order to provide ventilation and water pressure for hand washing.

The travel industry is already a major target for government restrictions, and we don’t need skippers failing to supply plenty of ventilation for passengers when engines are off.

Well I think we can all agree that makes sense.

Sure, but it's not how operations are being conducted at the moment. Sense bears no relation to our tyrannical master's actions. Screw covid, this is an opportunity for them!

LTNman

Worry less, circulation is provided by means of cabin fans that will run the air through the ducts, filters and all.

lederhosen

duh! But aren’t we facing a global pandemic?

Asked and answered above

Flying Clog

Do you live in North Korea? Where I live we don't have tyrannical masters. Just politicians who are a bit out of their depth but mostly trying their best to prevent the worst. It's a thankless task and comments like yours don't help.

There is a pretty clear indication that governments can make a difference. I am rather more confident based on the data so far available, that the Israeli approach of vaccinating people as quickly as possible and stopping flights for a while is likely to get the situation under control quicker than some other strategies. In fact I suspect UK Israel flights may be amongst the first to return to some sort of new normalcy, but that is speculation.

As long as there are some more or less consistent rules of the game, what lederhosen suggests might be a good solution. I.e. no travel restrictions, quarantine, tests or whatever between countries with a similar risk level. And said risk level is based on the choice and implementation of a specific approach. Zero COVID countries, like Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand, form a travel bubble among themselves. Countries with high vaccination levels, where risk is still somewhat higher than zero but a lot lower than elsewhere, form another bubble. And the remaining countries continue with the present status quo, changing rules and restrictions every other day until they do whatever it takes to join the "COVID-safe" club.

Pre Covid air travel will take years
 

It's hard to imagine a quick snap back of air travel after the pandemic. Primarily, because the end of the pandemic will not be uniform across the globe. Many poor countries will still be struggling to get their citizens vaccinated amid a lack of medical infrastructure.

Meanwhile, there's the growing work-from-home convenience and a new mindset of living, working and playing at a nice place where you don't have to fly away from. No need to be hooping back and forth across the skies for a vacation, a business meeting or whatever. Putting up with Covid testing, quarantine, face masks, baggage drills, security checks, visa, immigration controls, long queues has morphed into a debilitating drag on the senses.

Further to the topic of uneven recovery - it will also be very uneven by sectors, not only by parts of the world. Those who are most impatient to go globe-trotting once again are leisure travellers, those visiting friends and family, students, volunteers and all other people to whom flying is associated with fun and not with drudgery. They've been in forced confinement and away from loved ones for quite a while now and will jet off the moment they are allowed to. Unfortunately, most of those people have relatively limited budgets and the money usually comes out of their own pockets. So, this has implications on the airlines which will recover first and where you as a pilot are most likely to either be recalled from furlough or get a new job. Those are LCCs, leisure and charter. Right after them comes legacy regional and short-haul. Long-haul will be in the doldrums for the longest.

Add the two posts above together and you have pretty concise, sensible and accurate narrative on the challenges facing commercial aviation now and for the immediate future.

There are unfortunately more challenges to overcome when it can restart , i.e when the vaccine numbers will allow individual Sates to lift their travel restrictions and their different quarantine requirements : the infrastructure. If the current situation continues past this autumn, a lot of mid-size airports will not survive and most probably close. The ATC situation is similar , lot of privatized ATC service providers are deducing their workforce, and sometimes even close facilities ( e.g. Canada, today) . Assuming demand if there again , to rebuilt closed facilities takes years if not decades.
One way out will be for States to re-nationalize everything , but then we are back in the 1970s...

Or someone rich will become even richer very quickly. If failing airports with sound infrastructure, personnel and a potential for a decent route network are advertised for sale, they will surely make for a far better investment than any airline.

Not so sure . Frankfurt Hahn might be for sale soon, its financial agreements end up in 2021 and it has never made any money so far., even when Ryanair was the main customer( they left before Covid ) and there are a few Spanish airports which are already for sale. . Unlike owning an airline , no glory in owning air airport with no traffic,

Send a letter to the regulator(s) of the airlines you fly with. In my airline our APU is running before you board to purge the air and we shut it down after the last pax has disembarked. Most of us would leave it running for an entire turn around as well even though this is not strictly necessary since our early arrivals and low pax numbers inevitably lead to very long turnarounds. If you only travel on airlines which have draconian fuel policies and operate league tables then you may wish to reconsider your travel options.

I think a fundamental reality check is in order here.

A lot of us haven't been able to see our relatives where no flying is needed - simply because they live in other households beyond the limits to which we are restricted by lockdown.

Within that context - if the public are faced with a choice - new domestic lockdown as a consequence of inbound travellers delivering a new strain or mutation - or severe international travel limitations - which do you think they will choose? Personal freedoms within your national boundary and restrictions on travel across that boundary - or personal restrictions within your national boundary with miimal or no restrictions of travel across thet boundary?

Vaccination is not a 100% solution - though the adverts of the travel companies would suggest they would like to think otherwise.

One of the big differences between the way the pandemic has been handled is the number of inbound travellers and the control of them. The UK got just about every strain of Covid-19 under the sun - the reason for that was the level of international travel.

It has taken almost a year for the UK government to wake up to this.

It would have been better to have put controls in properly last spring once the seriousness of the situation became apparent. Now almost a year later we finally have organised quarantine.So they vaccinate the majoroity of vulnerable peopel and age groups by May. If they open the borders they are simply asking for successive new waves - not as bad as we have seen - but causing fatallities nonetheless - and in a worst case you get a new strain that undermines the vaccinations.

So the strategic choice is simple. Restrict international travel for the forseeable future and ensure personal liberty and safety and education and the mainstream economy within our borders. Or derestrict internatonal travel and risk throwing the economic sacrifice and vaccoination effort away - and incur extra deaths and have the population put under renewed restraint.

Explain that to people properly and I think we know what they will choose.

Draconian border controls, including an outright ban on all but essential foreign travel, only make sense as part of a true zero-COVID strategy. Think Australia, New Zealand or China. The UK is still a far cry from the adoption of anything close to their philosophy, namely that the only outcome of lockdown that is good enough to accept is zero community transmission. The much-dreaded UK mutation was not imported from abroad. It was a result of local transmission in Kent. Border closure alone wouldn't have prevented it. As long as the thing is running rampant within the country, there's always the risk of an even worse mutation.

So, to determine the correct border policy, a general choice has to be made and adhered to. What's the end game? Are we going to "live with the virus", as the policymakers suggest, or are we going to get rid of it? If it's the former, then the current measures suit the narrative just about fine. If it's the latter, shut the borders, make the lockdown seriously tough and as long as necessary to achieve complete eradication and then only open up to other zero-COVID countries.

...and, if the latter had been done as early as last spring and across the entire EU, by now COVID would have long been a third-world problem and the entire European population would have been enjoying their holidays on a clean and safe continent. Just a thought!

PilotLZ: That is the mathematical models some courageous scientists are putting forward: close all travel , stockpile food , tell/force everyone to stay indoors with a FFP2 or N95 mask on for 3 weeks and mathematically the virus is eradicated.
But that does not solve the problem of how to restart international travel afterwards, which is what in fact is the prime interest of our profession. If you restrict it to countries doing the same , then we cut the world in two, and for a very long time . How to protect illegal entries into "our" world ? walls? military ? A nice science fiction scenario..

Not necessarily so, the mutation was DISCOVERED in UK, who knows where it came from before discovery...

To all of us aviators it must be self evident that the Wuh Flu didn't arrive in Europe on a springless donkey cart but aboard airplanes.

Irrespective of masks, gloves, goggles, face shields, sanitizers, hepa filters, cabin fogging - Aviation remains as the ultimate global superspreader. How else could the new mutant UK strain wind up in USA? How else could the new South African Covid strain wind up in the European Union?

Let's face it: Until the global community has been vaccinated and has a grip on the proliferation of the Covid virus, international air travel must be suspended.
Cargo crews must remain under escort and in isolation at out stations. It's practical reality.

Physician and a pilot here... when you have test positivity rates of 10-15% as has been the case recently in much of the USA and Europe, it is simple math, statistics and epidemiology that would allow you to assume that you are carrying quite a few passengers who are carrying the virus on EVERY flight. Over time, this will be mitigated by an increasing percentage of the population that has relative immunity, either via vaccination or by natural immunity following an infection.

This refers to the role aviation played in spreading the virus

and this refers to the risk of catching the virus while actually aboard an aircraft.

You are quite correct Glueball, the aviation industry seems to be only interested in the risk of catching the infection during a flight and sees the risk in terms of a tiny percentage, while the international community are mainly concerned about the role aviation plays in spreading the virus. I think the aviation industry may be looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope.

Yes, to the extent that the original proposition, even if it was true (it isn't) - that HEPA filters fail to safeguard against spreading on-board infection - is largely irrelevant in the overall scheme of things.

While this thread has drifted - usefully - in a couple of directions, it's based on a misconception. The "bad news for the industry" is nothing to do with what goes on aboard the aircraft.

GlueBall

I think that you might have an unrealistic expectation on what these vaccines can and cannot do.
The current lot of vaccines.
DON'T prevent contraction of the virus.
DON'T prevent person to person spread.
But they DO lesson the severity of a virus infection. However considering that 80% of sub 60 year olds have either light or no symptoms, I do ask myself what it is we accomplish by vaccinating this demographic.

Some specialists already admit that we might be barking up the wrong tree with the assumption that population-wide, vaccine-induced herd immunity is the only worthwhile end game. The focus should be on protecting the vulnerable groups instead. As soon as they have been vaccinated, you have the remaining lot who aren't at a particularly high risk of getting seriously ill, overflowing the hospitals and dying. And keeping everyone locked up (now, for the sake of what/whom?) suddenly becomes a whole lot harder to justify.

lear999wa

You post a lot of things as fact that are just not known and will eventually be known and probably proven incorrect. And a complete misconception of what vaccines do! You are correct in that vaccines do not prevent an individual from encountering the virus, or prevent the virus from entering your nose. But they are very effective at preventing the virus from successfully setting up camp, from establishing a beachhead. That prevents illness, that prevents a significant viral load, and with no viral load, there is very little likelihood of transmission to others.

Just about every other vaccine in history has prevented transmission of the disease to others. And early studies out of Israel would seem to indicate that this is the case with the vaccines used in Israel, primarily the Pfizer vaccine.

That is exactly the problem. Look at the videos of the street parties in the US during super bowl last night to illustrate this, seems like teenagers do not want to wear masks feeling kind of immune when they are among each other.

Loose : re your post 61 : I am in with your "two" friends. Although I do wear a mask, if forced, because I can't be bothered with the agro or chance of a fine . That;s three then but I can assure you, less vocal are , literally, thousands of others. You know of two, now three ; I know of at least 142.. Look at a wider picture and instead of declaring that you "jus don't understand", I glean from your other posts that you probably will.

The young don't think they are immune, they simply don't feel threatened by it. For them it's just a nasty cold and life goes on. Being young they are ignorant of the wider implications as, through their selfish "I'm alright Jack" attitude, they spread the virus among the elderly in their families and friends' families. The selfishness of today's younger society is beyond belief.

According to multiple media, the "vaccine bubble" between Israel and Greece has been officially agreed upon by officials of both governments and is due to come into fruition about Passover time. Maybe that's a preview of the near future, after all?

I completely disagree with your doomssay scenario.

As others have pointed out: infection on board an aeroplane is one question, viral spreading around the world by bringing infected people from one country to another by means of traveling is another question.

The infection onboard an aeroplane problem is negligable. If there were significant infections onboard aeroplanes, we would know by now.

The problem of viral spread through the world by travel is also not a factor anymore. The virus is already everywhere, in all the populations, except some isolated countries on islands or under draconian political systems. May be (we will never know) we could have controlled worldwide spread one year ago with draconian travel restrictions, but we didn't. This ship has left the port and won't come back.

Now we have a virus that is basically everywhere, and we have to learn to live with it.

What does living with it mean? It means we get it under control in such a way that it becomes a sickness like other sicknesses, with reasonable deaht rates and severe cases to not overflow our health systems. Covid becomes then a health risk which is a normal individual life risk as any other sickness people die from every year.

How do we get it under control in this way? By vaccinating, especially the risk populations (>65y old and/or medical preconditions). Once these groups are vaccinated, severe cases and mortality will collapse, and Covid has become one out of many health risks. Once a country has reached that status, it can open its borders to anyone, without any restrictions, no testing and no quarantine anymore neccessary. People bringing the virus from other countries won't create surges in severe and mortal cases anymore. In parallel we can continue to vaccinate other parts of the population, to even increase control of the virus.

Subsequently, we have to study how the virus evolves, and probably adapt the vaccines, and it might be necessary, that the risk population gets a regular re-vaccination, like with the flu vaccine.

So in sum: no need to continue crippling one of the most important industries for global peace, mutual understanding between races, nations and economical development.

I disagree with your certainty 1201alarm that the risk of onboard infection is negligible. I refer again to a paper from the journal of travel medicine published back in September 2020, https://academic.oup.com/jtm/article...aaa178/5910636

I quote:
Four well-documented flights (Table 1) describe mass transmission events. Flights A and C present sophisticated proof from whole genome sequencing and provide essentially indisputable evidence of in-flight transmission to 11 and 2 secondary cases, respectively.

There have been plenty of other reported incidents. But this scientific paper presents the facts pretty well. It makes clear why it is difficult to track these events for example because of transmission between people not obviously infected and the need to eliminate transmission which occurred elsewhere, for example in transit or in quarantine hotels. The conclusions I took from this are that risk is related to length of flight, proximity to infected people and not wearing masks.

The risk onboard does however pale into insignificance compared to the spread in the wider population from individuals who fly in and then spread Covid into the community. New variants are a particular issue and the more people that are infected, the more opportunity there is for even more new variants to develop.

The BBC site today has a review of transmission in quarantine hotels and points to some amazing examples from Australia. The largest outbreak was traced back to such an incident with a security guard who was just unlucky enough to be in a corridor near rooms with infected people who had flown in. This one incident apparently accounted for over 90% of Australia's 29,000 cases and 909 deaths to date.

Seems like Hancock effectively just shut down almost all international travel for some time to come as far as the UK is concerned: "until we are sure of the vaccine efficacy against ALL variants of the virus, not just the current variants in the UK, [quarantine / hotel quarantine] restrictions will remain in place."

Just like its not possible to prove a piece of software is totally bug free, it will never be possible to assure a vaccine will protect against ALL variants - there will always be another variant / mutation just around the corner that the vaccine hasn't been tested / proven against.

PilotLZ

If you actually run the numbers on that strategy it doesn't look so good though.

Using UK figures (self-interest herby declared) the vulnerable number around 10million, (8.7 over 70 + >2 clinically extremely vulnerable, self-interest herby declared on the latter), there will be some overlap so call it 10 (the priority groups being vaccinated also include few million health and care workers etc.). NHS reckons 10% infection fatality rate for this group, which seems about right (most of the deaths so far with lower infection rate than the 20% population overall due to shielding etc.). Lets assume we don't care about anyone else or about long term damage to survivors (possibly more prevalent in younger groups).

Assume if we let it rip through everyone else we end up with around 80% exposed - Bergamo reached 70% 1st wave before a lockdown, Manaus got to over 60% but then had a second wave on top of that.
Also assume a "back to normal" means the vulnerable will see the same attack rate as population as a whole. Note: Newer variants, including the UK one, might well go higher.

Assume (optimistically) no new variants with vaccine-escape mutations (remember the bigger pool of virus/hosts the more likely mutations are).

Assume (optimistically again) no reinfections, or that reinfections are lighter and add no further mortality risk (already known to be false but we don't know in how many people).

Assume (optimistically) we can vaccinate 100% of the vulnerable 10m, none of them has health problems that prevent it, none of them has weird conspiracy beliefs about Bill G or religious beliefs that it makes you gay or whatever.

Assume vaccine efficacy is 90% (ball park for Pfizer, optimistic for Oxford/AZ), thus reducing IFR for the vulnerable group down to 1%.

Expected deaths: 10m * 0.8 * (1 - 0.9) * 0.1 = 80k further deaths. If vaccine efficacy is actually 75% (roughly Oxford stated) then it is 200k.

Bearing in mind that the NHS has struggled at various points to cope (and with a lot of collateral damage still to come from cancelled non-covid treatment) with around 110k deaths over a year, looks to me like you would still need other spread-control measures (i.e. lockdowns) to flatten the curve and avoid overrunning health care (if you overrun those death rates go up further). And if the optimistic assumptions don't hold....

OR we can view the vaccines, and vaccination of as many people as possible, as one more tool to control the spread of the disease alongside the tools we have (like lockdown). We can either use the tools to "flatten the curve" (haven't done a good job at that in UK so far, but maybe vaccines will make it more controllable), OR we can use them to keep cases going down, targeting zero. Now, targeting zero sounds good to me, a declining epidemic means a declining death rate for a start, but a declining case rate means declining pressure on the health service which means people might be able to get treatment for non-covid conditions again (final declaration of self-interest...).

I think best hope for travel and aviation industry is if enough countries / areas in the world get to low-and-declining or near-zero to establish air corridors around a significant portion of the world. The holiday/leisure market will return, maybe even with a big demand bounce, holidays mostly just haven't been happening, holiday money hasn't been spent. Business travel I'm not so sure - business (in other sectors at least ) has carried on and been forced to find other ways to work, some of that change may well be permanent.

@ infrequentflyer789 : I am in a working group with reps from ATC ANSPs and airlines discussing the future of the infrastructure and how to cope when it will rebound and how to finance it. Your analysis is not too far from what we hear at the moment however one major element is missing : predictability .
Corridors between safe countries that can be closed with 24h notice if cases are detected , like in Australia , or in the Canaries to take 2 recent examples does not help much tourism to restart. For business we see the same for trade shows, conference, which were always a major revenue for business travel, being cancelled on relatively short notice .The latest news we hear about variants combined with the possible need of multiple regular vaccine boosters (that do not exist yet) to counter them is not creating a serene atmosphere to plan a Sumer schedule. . Fear at the moment is that 2021 might be worse than 2020 for aviation and that we are in this for a very long time.