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...