Tag Archives for coronavirus.
Emirates President Sir Tim Clark is set to retire in June after 35 years with the airline and 17 as in his current role.
The 70 year old, who began his career at British Caledonian in 1972, gave an interview offering his perspective on where the airline industry is headed as it grapples with the coronavirus crisis. There are four key takeaways – including a challenging view of the virus itself and why it means we don’t need to remove seats from planes.
Up until this year anyone who claimed to need emotional support had been exempt from the rules about what kind of animals to bring, how many, and at what cost. We saw pit bulls, horses, turkeys, and birds of all kinds.
It turns out that exemptions to requirements for wearing a face mask work exactly the same way that bringing an emotional support animal onto a plane used to.
They can deny you boarding if they merely suspect you have coronavirus, or if they want you to obtain a test showing you do not have the virus and you decline. What will lead them to suspect someone may have the ‘rona? It could be temperature checks. It could be data shared via an app or the government in the future. It could be information about known exposures, including on a prior flight.
Consider this part of the new normal that we’re figuring out – we do not know what is going to happen in practice but United is updating its rules to allow them to take action based on what sort of testing or screening occurs.
Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly says it is safe to fly again, “We’re doing everything possible to encourage people to come back and fly.”
I’m going to offer what I hope is a slightly more limited and nuanced take, that it is safe for some people to plan now to travel again during the months of June, July and August. This is speculative, but sums up my currently thinking about where we stand.
There’s no longer a single country that doesn’t have a restriction on arriving passengers of some kind. Countries that don’t have a major coronavirus problem don’t want one. When and how will restrictions lift? Like most of what we know about coronavirus, heterogeneity rules.
In mid-April it seemed like the best place to get coronavirus testing might be the Dubai airport. And since they were running tests right away, it might even be faster to fly there, get tested, and come home. However the plan there was only to deploy testing for passengers heading to destinations that required a negative test for entry.
Starting Monday testing is available to anyone who wants it at the Vienna airport at a cost of $210. And Vienna is much closer than Dubai.
We might pick up the new coronavirus from surfaces, though most transmission is thought to happen from respiratory droplets. Blocked middle seats does nothing to protect someone in an aisle seat from the person in the aisle beside them – or the passenger behind them.
Science though suggests one change could that reduce virus transmission on planes in half.
To show how quickly things are changing – the modern day equivalent of one being as a thousand years and a thousand years one day – it was only Monday that American announced flight attendants would be required to wear masks and that starting May 1 they’d begin to roll out complimentary masks for customers as an option, subject to supply chain and operational constraints.
Indeed it was just six weeks ago that American still disciplined flight attendants who wore masks.
The Hong Kong International Airport is testing a new booth that people can walk through that will take their temperatures and disinfect their clothing and bodies. It does not test for the presence of viruses, though, or whether someone is contagious.
On Tuesday evening a private pilot took this flight over Maryland.
The Blue Angels and Thunderbirds performed a joint flyover, the Navy and Air Force squadrons performed a tribute to health care workers over Philadelphia, Trenton and New York. But this one solo pilot, I think, truly did the country proud.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
