MoL....oppssss🙄
https://onemileatatime.com/ryanair-ceo-interview/

One day after this 'pandemic' social distancing will have gone... So yes, the 25 min turnarounds will be back!

Give it an year and half +/-, a working vaccine, some virus normal weakening&people immunity and memories erasure process and yeap, indeed... No doubts about that.

Peoples memories are short, absolutely, but you still have to have money to travel especially for holiday travel which is entirely discretionary. The world wide wealth destruction that has occurred in the last month is unprecedented. For most average people it will take years to regain the financial position they had in January and many may never get back.

There are a range of possible outcomes and my guess is a good as yours, but the possibility of a permanent reset of the airline industry to a smaller footprint dominated by a few major players with near monopoly pricing power is definitely one of the possible outcomes. My personal opinion worth exactly what you paid for it, is that this is what I think is the most likely outcome.

Hope you are right - but here we are 40 years after the HIV virus and no vaccine found yet .... so I have my doubts about your comment.

You can’t compare HIV to a corona type virus, it’s a completely different type of virus. Just do a little bit of reading at least. If nothing else you’ll learn something new.

CP

And of course hope that the rent a car was properly disinfected..

There’s no vaccine for HIV, but big pharmaceutical companies make a load of money with the antiviral drugs that treat the disease though....make of that what you will.

https://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-eco/ai...RZ854znrCdZQrE

Air France will need 7 thousand million euros, will start to "release" staff with voluntary/mutual accordance and wont expect to return to normality at least within 2 years from now...

Or perhaps people should make some research before jumping to conclusions?

Here's a link highlighting the problems scientists are having with HIV:

https://www.healthline.com/health/hi...e-we#obstacles

This is particularly interesting as some seems to think finding a corona vaccine is going to be equally hard to come up with as it is with HIV.

"Most vaccines protect against viruses that enter the body through the respiratory or gastrointestinal systems. More viruses enter the body in these two ways, so we have more experience addressing them. But HIV enters the body most often through genital surfaces or the blood. We have less experience protecting against viruses that enter the body in those ways."

"Vaccines protect against disease, not infection. HIV is an infection until it progresses to stage 3, or AIDS. With most infections, vaccines buy the body more time to clear the infection on its own before disease occurs. However, HIV has a long dormant period before it progresses to AIDS. During this period, the virus hides itself in the DNA of the person with the virus. The body can’t find and destroy all of the hidden copies of the virus to cure itself. So, a vaccine to buy more time won’t work with HIV."

This last quote is talking about latent provirus (virus genome integrated into the DNA of the host cell) reservoirs in the CD4+ T cells. This is one of the huge challenges with finding a vaccine and a cure for HIV.

Finding a vaccine for the COVID19, and similar virus, on the other hand is routine work for medical professionals and scientists today. They just need time and from what I can see we are talking about 12-18 months before we have one (or more) available for mass distribution / vaccination.

Don't let facts ruin a good story though. ;-)

CP

CP, we do not even know whether someone who has fully recovered from this disease has any reasonable immunity to reinfection. We also do not know whether immunity to one strain (if that is even possible) gives immunity to another. Many teams are having a go at finding a useful vaccine because finding one is probably our best solution to this problem, but success is by no means a given.

Yep, well said. Doesn't seem to me like this is "routine work" and all we need is "time".

Going back to the ot.

I think more than a few people are trying to predict what’s going to happen based on common logic, previous economy patterns etc.

The thing is, this is not a case of which company is richer, bigger, older. This is a case of which companies can get money and credit lines from governments, shareholders and banks.
There is simply no way any private air transport business can survive something like this.

Just look at which group any given airline belongs to, or who are the shareholders, or if it’s backed by their governments and you’ll have a pretty accurate idea of who has a chance.

In a (not so) extreme example, nothing would stop all private airlines being wiped from the globe, and starting from scratch in a couple of years with new, debt free companies. Just saying.

Commercial aviation is vital to any country’s economy. VITAL. So in a couple of years time it will probably be almost normal. Between now and then, what I said before.
Good luck to all of us.

Rather unpleasant outlook but it's the same for many if not all industries and trades it seems. It looks like Corona crisis will not just take some months but maybe this entire year - at least. So we need strategies to return to normal before we in fact are back at (new) normal.

Very worrying times for the industry. No exit strategy means a complete impossibility to plan any recovery. Then this nugget appears today:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52439405

It appears some with an agenda are using this crisis as an opportunity to hit the aviation industry hard under the "Climate Change" banner. "Protect the NHS" is the UK Govt's strapline. Many seem to not understand that no economy = no tax income = no NHS. Aviation is a key economic pillar.

Whether we are aircrew, air traffic, engineering, ground support, manufacturers or any one of the plethora of related trades that make up this industry, we are all suffering here. Together we must stand. Stay safe all.

When the NHS hero-worship groupthink descends into resentment because of delayed diagnosis, delayed surgery, grannies not getting ventilated etc, at least we'll have videos of clapping and high-fives. Should be of comfort to those of us when the emails concerning litigations start coming in from the trust.

Completely agree that the long-view needs to start being taken, it hasn't to date.

Very true - with todays news, if the 50,000 jobs in the UK that rely on Airbus are lost along with million other jobs that depend on aviation that is a going to be a big hit to the ability to pay for things like the NHS.

Worrying indeed as it is exactly the same issue in France, Macron needs support from the ecologist parties ( green parties) to govern and win the next elections . His own Environment minister has declared this morning on a radio program that the Government will ensure that public money granted to help AF will be met by assurances that CO2 emissions will be drastically reduced , and that domestic flights will be restricted to favor SNCF high speed trains .
Ben Smith ( CEO AF) has apparently agreed to this and is reported to have also declared that it will take at least 2 years to get out of the current crisis .

Knowledgeable people down the pub used to explain to me why inflation was a good thing. I never did get the hang of it, despite being cushioned by it for a large part of my life. I'm not very proud of that by the way.

I hear Acme Air is expanding. What's the job situation? Just swap Acme for a slew of names and you'll know what I've been hearing for most of my flying life. Expansion is a company necessity, right? It's part of a model that can't function as a stable entity. I never understood why.

A neighbour of mine owned a lot of the town. I asked his advice about leasing office space. "The future rent will reflect the new value of the property. Investors expect that." Councils seem to have similar notions about rates. I understood unstable business models that so closely emulated greed.

I've never really understood why a world can't be run on cooperation and kindness, and nor it seems has a major nation, since such concepts could get one lynched. And now we've arrived at a point that we're ill-equipped to handle. Oh, we're making the right noises, but the truth of the situation has been spelled out in posts above, and for this reason we, that is all nations, shouldn't expect to go back to the pre-virus life we led. It is simply too dangerous - and that's trading and fiscal danger I'm talking about. We know about the risk of patchy Covid-19 flare-ups, but the danger of a second, or third quick-succession virus is statistically too real. The entire world needs to be braced for at least one added pandemic.

Talk of 'getting back to normal' fills me with unease, primarily because in so many people it feeds feel-good circuits in brains that are not seeing a history-altering danger any more clearly than they can see virions.

https://www.eurocontrol.int/sites/de...t-27042020.pdf
Eurocontrol forecast issued yesterday . very optimistic on both scenarios if you ask me , (but they did not :) ) because this is not what I hear when talking to people around me .
The so called Chinese recovery cannot really be transposed in Europe and private airlines will not fly empty aircraft around to please their Governments statistics....
The medical people everywhere are now preparing for a second wave as restrictions are lifted too early for political reasons . Then the effects mentioned by Loose Rivets on his post above might slow down even more aviation as we knew it .

The UK 2 week quarantine for arrivals doesn't seem to be fake news; absolutely insane but they really are actually proposing this.

If that goes ahead, then all UK operators (and most international businesses) may as well board up the windows and turn off the lights.

It's worked incredibly well here in NZ.

For the airlines, or for the spread of the virus?

If the latter, nailing everyone's door shut works even better, but eventually everyone starves.

That is the current politicians dilemma : who to listen to : scientific medical evidence based facts or business economic lobbies..Lifting the travel restrictions and you most probably get a second wave..I think the drone footage of the mass graves being dug in areas in New York and London might switch public opinion in favor of the medical guys .. Many Countries have current 2 weeks quarantine for arrivals, and as Chris2303 said, it works quite well for them .

Population of NZ >10x less than UK, UK is a European business and financial hub. NZ contained their limited number of cases very well, UK had to mitigate against extensive community spread.

The problem for NZ is managing their borders going forward. NZ is a country that is massively dependent on tourism. It is the country's largest export industry in terms of foreign exchange earnings and directly employs one in eight New Zealanders. No one is going to want to go on an adventure holiday to the land of Hobbits if it first means spending 14 days in a hotel room eating room service.

Talk about gross over reaction....once the cases get down to an acceptable level worldwide issue pax with masks to reduce occasional infected spreading their droplets. Get the HEPA filters working on turn arounds and you have pax entering the purest air environment outside operating theatres.

Except it’s the policy of some airlines not to run the APU for air conditioning during turnarounds to save money and prohibited by some tree hugging countries for noise abatement.

True Nightstop...but
 

I was in the Far East with SARs et al and this was mandated as it was one of the most effective measures Airlines could take. The tree huggers are going to find a lot less aircraft around after all this and will have to wind their necks in on this one.

It is frankly jaw dropping that governments seem absolutely content to completely destroy their economies for the sake of prolonging a few (in the grand scheme of things) lives. Future generations who will be paying the price of this for their entire working lives will not look kindly on the catastrophic overreaction. Society has been conditioned to believe that every life is priceless and must be saved at any cost. In reality a death is a tragedy for the people directly affected by it, but the world keeps turning and ultimately doesn't care.

People will still want to travel when this is over. Brits will want to take holidays. Political pressure to enable leisure and business travel is going to be immense. A Spanish politician was posturing recently, stating that Brits wouldn't be allowed into Spain as tourists because of the time it took for the lockdown to be implemented here. I suspect that other tourist hotspots (Greece, Turkey, Egypt etc.) will have a more pragmatic attitude if the Spanish insist on being intransigent. Plans for a two week quarantine for returning tourists will, I strongly suspect, be quietly shelved.

Guy has put one point of view. As an experienced captain having flown Boeings and Airbus for many years I have some interest in returning to flying. But if we take the other extreme, hopefully not likely but still possible, then there are a number of risks that still need to be considered. The first one is that we may not develop any meaningful immunity and a vaccine will prove elusive. Add to this equation that those previously infected might even get it worse the second time, particularly if they have lasting damage from the previous illness. Then things could get pretty bleak. Under this scenario this is not just going to kill a lot of the old and infirm but could affect a lot of others, not just in terms of people dying but those left disabled. I am not saying this the most probable scenario, and people may still want to continue as before. But it is not quite as simple as saying we have an end game and the sooner we exit the current measures the better off we will all be.

Think about it the way we do in aviation safety. If we halt any activity, we will bring the risk of any accident, incident or other abnormal occurrence to zero. However, that's obviously not the way forward as we won't survive for very long just sitting there and doing nothing. Therefore, we need to get going, accepting the inevitable risks and managing them appropriately.

The same goes for the current situation, I think. Lives can be saved from coronavirus by imposing total lockdown ad infinitum. But thus, far more lives will be lost to other causes in the long-term run. Poverty and famine, social unrest, increased violent crime rate, deterioration in existing health conditions, deterioration in mental health and whatnot else. Panic and its consequences kill people in themselves. Think about the significant drop in reported deaths from heart attack. Is this because people have all of a sudden become less susceptible to cardiovascular disease? Unfortunately not. It's because many fear seeking medical help for fear of being infected with the virus. And end up dying of something which could have been very well brought under control in other circumstances.

I am still optimistic that governments will realise this at some point and bring this insanity to a controlled end. Let young and healthy individuals go about their normal lives with appropriate protective measures in place. Protect the old, frail and chronically ill. It will still be a long journey, but this way there's at least some hope of a happy end in the coming years. And, hopefully, some cash flowing to keep aviation afloat in the meantime.

From what I've read, there is definitely not unbridled optimism within the immunology community that a vaccine is likely to be effective, neither does it seem remotely likely that exposure to the virus will confer full immunity, at least not long term. Therefore, unless we are prepared to accept the end of society as we know it, at some point we're going to have to accept that this virus is something that we're going to have to live with. The additional risk is minimal in the vast majority of cases.

Tens of millions of people will die over the coming years unless the virus becomes significantly less virulent. Most of them would have died in short order of another cause. Of course, some of the dead will be hitherto healthy individuals in the prime of their life, some will be children. There's no point burying our heads in the sand and pretending that this isn't a likely scenario. However, the consequences of shutting down economies and driving millions into poverty over a virus which has a mortality rate that by all reasonable accounts is far lower than 1% are simply unthinkable, and the product of a hysterical and catastrophic media driven overreaction. There will be a shift in the balance of public opinion. It's just a matter of when that shift occurs, but it will be sooner rather than later.

Edited to add: PilotLZ above was writing at the same time as me. His (or her) points are an excellent synopsis. Ultimately, life is not a risk free event.

I certainly hope we will get back in the air soon. If the virus has actually spread more widely and immunity in the population develops, then things could move quite quickly in a positive direction. But there is no clear evidence yet. I see the ONS has issued the latest UK mortality numbers for the week before last. The trend is not surprisingly bleak, 22,000 deaths versus an average of just over 10,000 for the corresponding week over the last five years and an increase of about 4,000 on the week before, which was already the worst this century. So things are by no means over, although with talk of the peak being passed it should improve over the coming weeks. I am actually more on the side of coming out of the restrictions sooner rather than later and it is perfectly plausible that once things improve the death rate may improve substantially as people who would otherwise have died have already passed away. But it is going to be a while before governments worldwide make coordinated decisions about this.

I have heard that how the virus infects you is also very dependant on how and with how much of the virus you get infected. If you get a few virus particles in you mouth, you will most likely survive, as your immune systems has sufficient time to respond. Get a few million deep in your lungs and anyone will be in serious trouble, possibly even if you have been infected before. So social distancing and/or masks (and possibly UV light) will probably remain an important part of our lives for a long time to come.

Agree with you both lederhosen and PilotLZ.
Guy incognito : As we speak in a remote area in Germany not far from where I live, a small village cemetery crematorium is working H24 with a lot refrigerated truck trailers from France and Belgium parked in streets blocking the nearby residential area. The total number of people dying at the moment is far above normal in those countries , whether due to the COVID 19 or other causes because hospitals are either full or people are afraid to go to them .

ATC Watcher: I don’t necessarily disagree with your assessment that the figures may be under-reported.

With that said, the (questionable) Imperial study that the government seems to have heavily relied on in the UK (or at least been sufficiently spooked by to be spurred into a change in policy) has as its worst case doomsday scenario a death toll of 500,000 in the UK if no measures were taken. In absolute terms that is a big number, but it’s still an extremely small proportion of the UK population. Even that worst case projection cannot logically justify the damage currently being wrought on the economy.

Lederhosen - did you read that somewhere or is that speculation? Everything I have read has said that if there isn't lasting immunity, then at least subsequent attacks would be LESS severe. And long term side effects are minimal for cases not requiring an ICU (eg a few examples of the lung "ground glass opacity" though even that may heal - long term data is of course, not available).

To answer Joe le Taxi I posted a reference last week on the jet blast virus thread about evidence of worrying damage to the lungs amongst a cohort with relatively mild illness (not requiring ICU treatment as reported by doctors at the main hospital in Innsbruck) and there has subsequently been more of the same from other sources. Another issue appears to be that the virus can cause inflammation leading to damage in other organs as well. It is too early to tell how big an issue this is. I am not aware of anyone with these types of injury being reinfected and let's hope that cannot happen. But equally there is no proof to the contrary. There are diseases where previous infection reduces subsequent severity. But there are also examples (like Dengue) which get worse.

A year ago if people had suggested taking affirmative action to kill 500,000 British citizens, they would have been sent to the funny farm. And that is the issue. It isnt the guy in the street nor the 4 striper who stops or eases lockdown, it is the government, and that means the cabinet or perhaps just Boris.....It must be the most difficult quandary. If they get it wrong, not getting re elected will be the least of their problems.

The comment about New Zealand not only shows how the UK and some other countries failed dismally, but also the problems moving forward. Many industries will restart, and some havent even stopped, but tourism, hospitality and transportation will be badly effected by reduced demand from frightened citizens and ongoing restrictions from frightened politicians until there is a vaccine. Fortunately it is very very likely one of the many vaccines will work, and if it is one of the early ones and we can develop manufacturing capacity (purely a matter of money and will power) we could vaccinate 70% of the developed world, except perhaps the USA, by Q1 next year

^This.

Viral load is the factor here that many simply don't either understand or want to understand, and the implications on our industry, or indeed all public transport systems.

I have a relative by marriage, that is struggling to recover from Covid19, as he worked for TfL on the London Underground and was clearly heavily exposed over many days to the virus from being in close proximity to many people carrying it. Middle aged but no underlying health issues. There have been a number of London bus drivers die from it from similar expose. Just as many of the health workers have died from it as well.
Getting on an aircraft for 10-12 hours long haul couped up with many people that maybe infected is not really a great idea, nor will sitting on a crowded bus or train be either.

This virus needs a animal or human body to survive and mutiply, deny it one of those for long enough and you get rid of it.....but if its still dotted around the world and people are travelling around the world it will never be erased, and potentially could mutate into something far worse.

Trying to get back to a normal too soon could spell a greater disaster for the human race than the one currently being experienced.

My job in aviation is gone, and I doubt I'll ever work in aviation again, but tourism and travel has to be put on hold now for the short term, to stand any chance to this being dealt with.