Covid-19; Impact on the aviation industry

Tenzor07

fr336 wrote: »

How full do we think the flights newly operating today are? Must be okay otherwise they'd be cancelled right? Uptick in activity here in Luton out my left hand window but nothing like back to normal. Think there's only the one daily flight to Dublin and Belfast now whereas usually it could be four a day. And no return for Cork or Kerry yet.

Ryanair operating at 40% according to their press... I'm sure other airlines aren't even half that.... check flightradar?

fr336

Tenzor07 wrote: »

Ryanair operating at 40% according to their press... I'm sure other airlines aren't even half that.... check flightradar?

No I meant how full of passengers do we think they are. Hard to believe the schedule today, it's barely a winter schedule let alone summer...but we are where we are.

Tenzor07

fr336 wrote: »

No I meant how full of passengers do we think they are. Hard to believe the schedule today, it's barely a winter schedule let alone summer...but we are where we are.

Probably about the same, I mean back in April i'd say it was only 20% of capacity at best and with the mixed messages and a medical official telling people in Ireland not to travel it will be a while before flights are full, certainly between cities at least.

Irish Steve

Tenzor07 wrote: »

I'm sure you copied this from a reliable online Journal, however in reality you're more likely to get Covid on the Bus or train on the way to the airport.

I mean if you pop off the mask and walk along the cabin coughing and you're infected then the chances of droplets spreading is higher.

But what you have said just doesn't hold water, sit beside someone coughing and sneezing openly or if you touch a surface they have touched with their hand after coughing or sneezing into it and then you touch your face then yes you do have a higher risk, but the virus being carried around by the cabin air system??

No not an online journal, I was listening earlier today to a relevant expert on virus management who was being interviewed on RTE 1 about the whole subject area, and he was being very specific about the issues of droplet spread around the edges of face coverings.



There were also some very thought provoking high speed videos shown by Sky a while back that were made to specifically track the spread of droplets in different scenarios, and the distances covered in different ways were challenging, which (albeit slightly off subject) was one of the absurd reasons given earlier this week in the UK for wanting musicals to re open without singing, if you every heard anything so stupid!



There will be other aviation hot spots, the main ones I can see will be the security scan trays, as they are unlikely to be being sanitised after each use, and the handrails on the airstairs on 737's, and the seat belt buckles, they are all risks that can be managed with appropriate thought ahead of time, and suitable protections such as gloves or sanitisers, but the key issue is ensuring the correct protection and remembering to use the right things at the right time.



And yes, things like Buses, Trains, the LUAS and the like could be an equal level of risk, as are things like crowds/audiences at shows etc, but the difference is that for a lot of people, travel by air at the moment is not an essential journey, whereas other transport systems may well be unavoidable because of work commitments.



Like it or not, Covid has not gone away, the massive numbers of new cases on a daily basis in the Americas, Asia and Africa, as well as hot spots in the UK, and repeat flare ups in China, Australia and other countries are all indicative that releasing the lock down status is not without risk.


Minimising optional risk like non essential overseas travel has to be a worthwhile option, given how serious the consequences may be if the relevant managers and advisers get it wrong.

marno21

fr336 wrote: »

How full do we think the flights newly operating today are? Must be okay otherwise they'd be cancelled right? Uptick in activity here in Luton out my left hand window but nothing like back to normal. Think there's only the one daily flight to Dublin and Belfast now whereas usually it could be four a day. And no return for Cork or Kerry yet.

Luton is back to Cork and Kerry tomorrow.

FR busy again from Cork tomorrow. Only EI flight remains the 722 to LHR for the moment.

Tenzor07

Irish Steve wrote: »

No not an online journal, I was listening earlier today to a relevant expert on virus management who was being interviewed on RTE 1 about the whole subject area, and he was being very specific about the issues of droplet spread around the edges of face coverings.
There were also some very thought provoking high speed videos shown by Sky a while back that were made to specifically track the spread of droplets in different scenarios, and the distances covered in different ways were challenging, which (albeit slightly off subject) was one of the absurd reasons given earlier this week in the UK for wanting musicals to re open without singing, if you every heard anything so stupid!
There will be other aviation hot spots, the main ones I can see will be the security scan trays, as they are unlikely to be being sanitised after each use, and the handrails on the airstairs on 737's, and the seat belt buckles, they are all risks that can be managed with appropriate thought ahead of time, and suitable protections such as gloves or sanitisers, but the key issue is ensuring the correct protection and remembering to use the right things at the right time. And yes, things like Buses, Trains, the LUAS and the like could be an equal level of risk, as are things like crowds/audiences at shows etc, but the difference is that for a lot of people, travel by air at the moment is not an essential journey, whereas other transport systems may well be unavoidable because of work commitments.
Like it or not, Covid has not gone away, the massive numbers of new cases on a daily basis in the Americas, Asia and Africa, as well as hot spots in the UK, and repeat flare ups in China, Australia and other countries are all indicative that releasing the lock down status is not without risk.
Minimising optional risk like non essential overseas travel has to be a worthwhile option, given how serious the consequences may be if the relevant managers and advisers get it wrong.

Nothing is 100%, staying at home with close or no contacts is. Wearing a mask is proven to lessen the risk in crowded environments.

Those tests as far as I can recall were carried out using dummies with air-nozzles, or was it the one done using computer simulations? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8201877/Horrifying-simulation-shows-six-feet-not-jogging-someone.html
That article nearly had people out with sticks beating joggers and cyclists! And weren't proven science by any means!

Again I will go back to public transport, how many times a day do you think the handrails on a Dublin bus are sanitised? Probably as much as the Airstairs on the 737, yet we live with it, we wash and sanitise our hands, we don't touch our faces or put fingers up noses, we wear masks...!!
Same with the trays at security, wash and/or sanitise, we're all well used to it now. A Spanish company is already making machines that automatically clean the trays: https://ucemachines.com/ I've been though airport security a few times since March and not so much as a sniffle.

Like it or not the virus hasn't gone away, and we've had the past 3 - 4 months to learn how to practice an almost surgeon like level of hygiene, as have airlines and airports which are MUCH cleaner than the local Shopping centre or Supermarket thousands of people go to per day.

Business travel will take a heck of a lot longer to return to levels we had until this year, maybe never will, however for everyone else if we keep up the efforts in the EU that have seen cases in low single figures consistently every day then we can travel and keep the risks at the same or lower than travelling within country.

TheDriver

Tenzor07 wrote: »

Probably about the same, I mean back in April i'd say it was only 20% of capacity at best and with the mixed messages and a medical official telling people in Ireland not to travel it will be a while before flights are full, certainly between cities at least.

Plus all the people now who have booked but choose not to travel, they're effectively sold seats

Tenzor07

TheDriver wrote: »

Plus all the people now who have booked but choose not to travel, they're effectively sold seats

Yea so if you are travelling on RA then no need to purchase seats as you may have the row to yourself...

TheDriver

Tenzor07 wrote: »

Yea so if you are travelling on RA then no need to purchase seats as you may have the row to yourself...

True. Most people who are travelling prob paid for them already though. Especially if they're families and had to.

Zonda999

fr336 wrote: »

No I meant how full of passengers do we think they are. Hard to believe the schedule today, it's barely a winter schedule let alone summer...but we are where we are.

On one of the Cork radio shows this morning they had some one from Cork Airport. They mentioned that in the past week or so, even though they have only had a max to two flights per day (EI to LHR & FR to STN), the load factor was typically under 40% (Thats roughly 75 people on a 189 seat Ryanair 737). He also mentioned that during the height of the lock down in April that some of those flights to London had loads of less than 10 people per flight.

I suspect based on looking at some of the fares available for some of the Ryanair flights in the next few weeks that average loads are probably under 60% on average.

highlydebased

Cookiemunster wrote: »

Have you looked at the infection rates in the UK recently? They're the worst performing country in Europe. .

There are actually worse performers, believe it or not. In terms of cases per 100k, one of the countries on this list doing worse is a surprise...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1110187/coronavirus-incidence-europe-by-country/

L1011

highlydebased wrote: »

There are actually worse performers, believe it or not. In terms of cases per 100k, one of the countries on this list doing worse is a surprise...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1110187/coronavirus-incidence-europe-by-country/

Easy to have an apparently lower cases per 100k when you aren't testing enough; or in the case of the UK have split in to "Pillar 1" and "Pillar 2" test reporting.

Private tests and in-home tests are considered "Pillar 2" and aren't put into the headline figures.

Basically, out and out fraud just like their massaging of the death figures.

JohnC.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/el-al-said-to-ground-all-flights-amid-labor-dispute-financial-crisis

El Al grounded. All planes ordered to return to Israel, including those mid-trip.

Noxegon

State to keep travel restrictions and quarantine regulations in place

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/covid-19-travel-restrictions-unlikely-to-be-lifted-before-july-20th-1.4295887

Tarabuses

Noxegon wrote: »

State to keep travel restrictions and quarantine regulations in place

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/covid-19-travel-restrictions-unlikely-to-be-lifted-before-july-20th-1.4295887

The headline of that story seems to be contradicted by the first paragraph of the article. Not unusual for media reports of course.

Kcormahs

Air Baltic has had government support approved by EU

https://www.flightglobal.com/strategy/eu-approves-latvian-governments-250-million-aid-for-air-baltic/139152.article

I am starting to agree with a few people here who say Aer lingus may end up being the only “Legacy” carrier in Europe getting 0 from the government even if they or IAG asked for it. (Yes I know its a private company. So it was Lufthansa etc and they also got help). The luck of the Irish! ðŸ˜

Calina

highlydebased wrote: »

There are actually worse performers, believe it or not. In terms of cases per 100k, one of the countries on this list doing worse is a surprise...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1110187/coronavirus-incidence-europe-by-country/

Are you talking about Luxembourg? If so, you should know they are testing everyone in the country, symptomatic or not. They have tested around 30% of the population to date, around 225,000 out of a population of 650,000. I suspect Ireland's incidence might be a bit higher if you had tested 1.5 million people already.

Cookiemunster

Kcormahs wrote: »

Air Baltic has had government support approved by EU

https://www.flightglobal.com/strategy/eu-approves-latvian-governments-250-million-aid-for-air-baltic/139152.article

I am starting to agree with a few people here who say Aer lingus may end up being the only “Legacy” carrier in Europe getting 0 from the government even if they or IAG asked for it. (Yes I know its a private company. So it was Lufthansa etc and they also got help). The luck of the Irish! ðŸ˜

Lufthansa etc asked for help and had to jump through hoops to get it. No government volunteered any funds.

Nijmegen

No “green list” till at least July 20 and overseas travel still discouraged after cabinet meeting.

https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1280173392533094401?s=21

dfx-

17% of single figures cases? That's barely one a day.

'The fear' of a second surge will be very slow to leave very risk averse people such as health officials in charge

Tenger

Not publishing that list until 20th seems bizarre.
Considering parts of Europe were re-opening based on number of active cases as far back as June 3rd.

Beechwoodspark

Dismayed to see some pushing to reintroduce the virus into Ireland at higher levels for frivolous reasons

But Glad to see the govt reaffirm the advice against all non essential travel

Blut2

Tenger wrote: »

Not publishing that list until 20th seems bizarre.
Considering parts of Europe were re-opening based on number of active cases as far back as June 3rd.

Its entirely in-line with everything done here so far to be fair - excessive conservatism/slow-to-action, with nothing based on facts/statistics. Schools opened as far as back as April in other European countries, and no problems resulted. But somehow our government figured Irish schools were different, and kids have suffered as a result.

With the borders its the exact same: Italy's have been open since June 3rd with no major issues. And almost everywhere else in Europe in various stages by late June. So we would already see any massive travel related outbreaks, if they had happened. But Ireland is sui generis apparently.

This on top of it making absolutely no logical sense to advise against travel to countries with lower daily case numbers than Ireland...

dfx-

Tenger wrote: »

Not publishing that list until 20th seems bizarre.
Considering parts of Europe were re-opening based on number of active cases as far back as June 3rd.

There are clearly safe places to arrive from. As safe as you could get in the circumstances. This should be the easiest time to track everyone.

Probably not the US or UK and maybe that's what they're holding out for.

If they can't 'risk' tracking the one or two cases a day from international travel now, they have no hope whenever they do open it.

They've got to accept that the country has to reopen before a vaccine and it will bring in extra cases. The virus will still be on the planet on July 20th. What are they waiting for?

Credit Checker Moose

Beechwoodspark wrote: »

Dismayed to see some pushing to reintroduce the virus into Ireland at higher levels for frivolous reasons

But Glad to see the govt reaffirm the advice against all non essential travel

All it is, is advice. People are free to ignore it.

MoeJay

The longer this inaction and indecision goes on, the bigger the hole the government are digging for aviation, travel and tourism. I can only hope they are as resolute about assisting everyone back out of what they are creating, but the track record is not good...

SimonTemplar

On another forum, someone mentioned this document from the ECDC https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/RRA-Resurgence-of-reported-cases-of-COVID-19-in-the-EU-EEA.pdf which is a risk assessment of COVID cases dated 2nd July.

This paragraph, a part of which is included in the summary, caught my eye:

ECDC does not consider travel restrictions within and to the Schengen area as an efficient way to reduce
transmission within the EU since community transmission is already ongoing in the EU/EEA, and TESSy data show
that, in June 2020, only 3% of confirmed cases were likely infected in a country different from the reporting
country. In this phase of the epidemic, imported cases are likely to represent a negligible minority of the cases
reported in EU/EEA countries and the UK, whatever the incidence in the country of origin is.

I'm sure such documents go through many drafts, revisions and approvals so I'd tend to trust that more than personal tweets or off-the-cuff comments made in interviews.

Irish Steve

If perhaps people were actually reading some of the articles on other sites and in other places, they'd see things like a cluster outbreak In Melbourne which is causing concern was partly caused by security guards at a high risk isolation area sharing a cigarette lighter.

Yes, something that simple and in theory innocent has contributed to a cluster flare up that has been detected as a result of the tracing systems that are being used in Australia. Unfortunately, we don't have such high profile and successful track and trace here yet.

It might not seem that way, but we have been incredibly lucky so far with the numbers, despite that, a significant number of people have died as a direct result of the effects of Covid. The down side of that is that a large number of people have not seen any impact on their lives or their relatives as a result of Covid, and that has spawned a very definite negative attitude towards lockdown, rules and all the other aspects of the "new reality" that is what we are going to have to live with for some time to come, unless we want to put a large number of people into isolation for the rest of their lives, and allow the rest to carry on as if nothing has changed.

That might sound possible, but with the way that these infections spread, it won't work out like that, and the result will be the sorts of problems that are being seen in the Americas, Africa and India, and the possible consequences of that for those countries are not nice. If some of the less acceptable behaviours of recent days are repeated over a longer period, there is the very real risk of a larger second wave of cases, and the effect of such a wave on the already stretched health service is not a pleasant thought.

So, there are a lot of things that really don't have to happen, or that can happen in a different way in order to avoid increasing the risk to the rest of the community. A lot of activity that people have taken for granted is not actually essential. Nice, and even theraputic, but not essential, and for quite some time to come, the gold standard that will protect the maximum number of lives will be to proceed with caution. Some of that caution may require some fundamental changes in how "successful" economies actually operate, and maybe there will have to be some fundamental changes to the way that things operate going forward, and those changes could well be a lot more significant and life changing than the "green" climate change agenda, but at the end of the day, how do you put a value on human lives, in many countries?

I don't have all the answers, far from it, but I do know that this pandemic was and is and will be a fundamental game changer for many aspects of the comfortable bubble that too many of us have become comfortable with, and that bubble is in the process of being fundamentally burst, with very little chance of being able to repair it

Cheap flights to almost anywhere in the world, cheap prices for items imported from half way round the world, they are just the thin end of a very substantial wedge that IS going to hit all aspect of economic life over the next period of time, and the denials that keep coming from some significant and in theory influential people are not going to change the eventual outcome.

A massive impact on aviation, travel, tourism, the pub culture, they are only the start of the changes, and there will be many more, and it won't be easy. My biggest fear is that the pain won't be evenly or fairly distributed, there are some aspects of the way the system works that will mean that some "elite" will see very little impact on their lifestyle, while others are pushed even harder beyond their limits, and what is already very clear is that a return to the "austerity" model is doomed to failure, so the core of much of modern society has to be completely rethought, and restructured, but who is capable of doing it, and how they will do it, that's way beyond the scope of this thread.

Nijmegen

“Excessive conservative action” is exactly what I’d like in a global pandemic, actually. I see New Zealand are working with airlines to actively limit the number of even their own citizens returning so as not to overwhelm their quarantine facilities: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/07/new-zealand-rations-places-for-citizens-returning-home-during-covid-19

I think Steve has it spot on: The health authorities here looked at other countries that had a really bad outbreak just before us and prepared a full spectrum response. We prepped beds for thousands more patients than we needed in the end based on the experience of countries that got hit bad. And then we swerved hard enough that a lot of folks are like “well that wasn’t so bad, was it?!” It’s like saying why wear a seatbelt because you didn’t crash the first time you did a dirt rally.

An interesting thing about the travel restrictions here, which are basically relying on personal compliance, is that you get a unique view into human selfishness. We have plenty of disparate examples in everyday life - people who drive like idiots, putting others at risk etc. But this is unique insofar as we can all catch and spread this disease the same as one another, in the knowledge that there’s a low chance you personally will die of it but a high chance that if you were to spread it that someone else could die of it.

What’s being asked is that people take personal responsibility and the advice is clear from medical professionals who will clean up any mess you create: Please don’t travel. And then you read instant experts in epidemiology, who couldn’t spell the word without autocorrect a few months back, explaining why they think they know better. In reality, they’re more willing to take the risk for everyone else because they want the few cheap San Miguel and some nice weather.

I’d say researchers in future will have a field day studying the human behaviour around Covid. I also think that if we do get a second wave influenced by travel (and let’s face it, we’ve already had some shots across the bow ala Sligo) you’ll find very few people in a few months who will still have their holiday snaps up on their social media accounts. But for now they’re willing to take the risk, mainly with someone else’s life.

Noxegon

Nijmegen wrote: »

What’s being asked is that people take personal responsibility and the advice is clear from medical professionals who will clean up any mess you create: Please don’t travel. And then you read instant experts in epidemiology, who couldn’t spell the word without autocorrect a few months back, explaining why they think they know better. In reality, they’re more willing to take the risk for everyone else because they want the few cheap San Miguel and some nice weather.

I think there are also some people that take the view that if you can't beat them, join them. I've been ridiculously careful over the last few months – and continue to be – yet when I see footage of the carry-on in central Dublin over the weekend it makes me wonder why I'm bothering.

Just a thought.