Coronavirus has hit some sectors more strongly than air transport, cutting tens of thousands of jobs and billions in revenue.
by Samanth Subramanian
When an airline no longer needs an aircraft, it is sent to a cemetery, a garage facility where it is located outdoors on paved land, until the end of the wing with other unwanted aircraft. Seen from the sky, planes look like the bleached remains of a long-forgotten skeleton. The largest cemetery in Europe was built on the site of an airfield in the 1930s in Teruel, eastern Spain, where the dry climate is favorable for steel cells. long-term garage, waiting for their time while replacing owners or performing maintenance. If their long term is less clear, they enter the garage in the long run. Sometimes the limbo of an aircraft ends when dismantled, its structure is successfully remodeled into spare portions and recycled steel.
In February, Patrick Lecer, CEO of Tarmac Aerosave, the company that owns Teruel Cemetery and 3 others in France, set his eyes on China. Lecer has been in the air force long enough not to forget that the flights were stranded by the Sars outbreak in 2003. This year, when the coronavirus spread beyond Asia, I knew what was going on. it was going to happen. ” We started creating areas on our sites, betting on tetris with the plane to lose two, 3 or four more areas in each,” he told me.
At the end of March, after the United States closed its skies to Europe, the planes began to land on the Tarmac Aerosave bones. No one knew if they were going for short term apartment or long term storage. On April 3, the Teruel yard won five Boeing 747s and two Boeing 777s; In the following weeks, planes from Lufthansa, Air France, Etihad and British Airways arrived; before the pandemic there were 78 planes in Teruel; in June, 114, operating near full capacity from 120 to 130. Patrick Lecer’s other 3 bones were also “near saturation,” he told me in July. It seemed serious. He had just spent two hours on the phone with an airline looking for him to space another 30 planes. “I have been operating in this industry for almost 40 years and have never noticed anything like it. It seems like a tragedy.
Among all industries affected by Covid-19, aviation has suffered in two different ways. Of course, there is concern about contagion. No other business depends on bringing strangers closer to your thighs for hours and hours, while transporting potentially ill-healthy humans from one continent to another. Less directly, there’s the collapse of the economy. It is an axiom in aviation that air transport is correlated with GDP. When other people have more money, they borrow more. But in the midst of this historic recession, no one buys plane tickets.
In the past, airlines have only been affected by one or the other of these factors. During sars, it was not safe, but the world economy did not stan. During the 2008 monetary crisis, cash was scarce, but stealing was not a fitness risk In the 110 years since the dawn of advertising flights, such blows had never been carried out in tandem until this year.
For customers, investors and airlines, an earthly lifestyle was pre-coronavirus. For advertising aviation, the more than two decades have been a time of superheated growth. In 1998, airlines sold 1. 46 billion tickets for one type of flight or another. By 2019, that number had risen to 4. 54 billion. This year he has undone everything. In early March, the International Air Transport Association (Iata) published two prospective scenarios. The excessive maximum predicted an overall loss of earnings of $ 113 billion. As of mid-April, about 14,400 airliners worldwide, 65% of the world’s fleet, had been in storage, according to the aviation research company Cirium. The companies that have been on the brink, or in some cases have completely collapsed, are Virgin Australia and Virgin Atlantic, Flybe in the United Kingdom, South African Airways, LATAM and Avianca in South America, Compass and Trans States in the United Kingdom. . United States. Airlines for America, an advertising group, calculated that the last time the United States averaged fewer than 100,000 passengers a day was in 1954. Emirates has become so desperate for passengers that it has promised to fork out $ 1,765 for a funeral if someone dies Covid -19 after being robbed with them.
In June, Iata had to publish a review: revenue will fall to $419 billion this year, precisely part of what airlines earned in 2019, figures that are barely credible, even for industry veterans Boet Kreiken, executive vice president of visitor delight at Dutch airline KLM, recalled an assembly at the beginning of the pandemic at KLM offices near Amsterdam-Schiphol Airport. His colleagues had provided the latest figures on new reserves and shadowy projections for next summer. “I have noticed crises in my time — the war in Iraq, on September 11, the Sars, the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, ” said Kreiken. “I know in the gut what it feels like. But it’s anything else. Looking on the chart and I was so worried about thinking about the consequences others had in saying twice, “Boet, the assembly begins!”
Before the pandemic, airlines struggled with another motivation opposed to flying: aviation accounts for 12% of all carbon dioxide emissions from transport, and flying is so reasonable and simple that we can load without thinking about this carbon explosion in seconds to book an electronic ticket price in an app from London to New York and return generates 1,972 kg of carbon dioxide , more than the average population of Madagascar or Colombia in one year.
Last year, KLM unveiled an initiative that looked like an order for fewer businesses. “Do you still want to meet us in person?asked a voiceover in an ad. ” We all have to fly once in a while. But next time, I’ll fly with responsibility. “There was a little courage there,” a KLM executive told me. “It had to be submitted to the board three times before it was approved. “The AdArray, as ambitious as it is, also adapts to a larger schema. As highs, other people are asked to control their spending habits, even when governments and large companies are doing much less than they could just to curb their carbon spending. At the same time, we trust through the airlines that our re-exercise deserves to be only temporary, and that some technological salvation – a battery-operated or hydrogen aircraft – will take us back to our tactics very soon.
This year, when the industry’s fortunes plummeted and executives tried to run their airlines while most of their planes remained on the ground, another kind of technological salute emerged. The long-term flight now appears to be connected to the discovery of an effective Covid-19 Vaccine. The vital challenge of how much we fly has given way to the even more basic uncertainty of when and how we will fly back regularly.
KLM is considered the oldest advertising airline in the world, meaning it is the oldest airline still operating under its original name. Last October, KLM turned 100 and Pieter Elbers, its CEO, felt in a good mood. when he was 22 and working around the world before peaking in 2014. He told me KLM’s profit margin for this year was 2%. “From there, we went up to 8% last year, so there was a positive and positive atmosphere. “In December 2019, he visited many KLM offices around the world to celebrate the centenary that made the decision to spend New Year’s Eve at his home in Amsterdam. A few weeks later, when KLM airlines in China began postponing operations, Elbers heard the first whisper about a strange new virus.
Believing that China would soon involve the disease, Elbers and his team reduced the frequency of KLM flights to China, reassigning those aircraft to U. S. routes. By February, however, the pandemic had spread to Europe; Holland had closed its doors until March. In KLM workplaces, only Elbers and part of a dozen executives continued to go to paintings to combat the crisis. hour on empty roads. ” Everyone sitting in my workplace because it’s spacious enough to stay away from each other. “Sometimes I would go to Schiphol and look at the sleeping planes and the desolate terminal.
The metabolism of the aeronautical industry tends to be slow: planes are ordered years in advance, routes laid out and pilots trained with measured attention; however, during the pandemic, decisions had to be made at an unusual pace. A KLM flight somewhere over Novosibirsk, bound for Shanghai, learned that each and every incoming flight crew will now have to be quarantined for 14 days at a Chinese public hospital. This rule was so new that it did not exist when the plane left Amsterdam; The leaders were quick to download a waiver approved by the Dutch and Chinese governments so the team can stay aboard the plane in Shanghai and take it home 18 hours later.
That same month, Elbers withdrew 3 Boeing 747s, huge fuel-consuming cars that were about to be put on the grasses anyway. A few weeks later, they had to get rid of them from the garage and put them into service for the shipment of medical devices and PPE. from China to the Netherlands. There were confusing repatriation flights to take. Two thousand Dutch travellers had to be picked up from Australia. The first repatriation flight to Sydney was due to depart 48 hours in advance, but it had been 20 years. since KLM had flown there, so long that routes and accesses had to be redrawn and loaded into flight computers.
Airline representatives typically meet twice a year at “slot conferences” to assign landing and takeoff spaces to airports around the world over the next season, said Vincent van Hooff, who oversees KLM’s flight operations. But now it was a whole new game, would we still fly to London tomorrow?Would we want more spaces for repatriation flights?It was almost as if we suddenly had a charter flight company.
In the midst of this chaos, the effects of the pandemic on destruction seemed sudden and tectonic. Richard Aboulafia has another point of view: “Nothing new is happening. It just happens faster. ” Aboulafia is the vice president of analytics for Teal Group, an authorship market research company, and each month sends a widely read newsletter in the industry. “Dear colleagues, dark cloud dwellers,” he wrote in May, examining the contours Airlines will collect money, predicted, and decide on smaller, more effective aircraft. They’ll make more point-to-point connections, leaving the old star networks, the kind that forces us to fly from one town to another in a minimum of two stages, through a hub airport in a giant metropolis. Some of the adjustments were underway even last year, argued The coronavirus only makes them more practical.
One way to perceive these trends, Aboulafia told me, is to use the industry’s popular maximum metric: the seat-mile. If an aircraft with three hundred seats available travels 1,000 miles, that flight records three hundred,000 seats-miles. . Airlines consistently compare the benefit of having a seat-mile, or Rasm, with the charge consistent with having a seat-mile, or Casm. Aboulafia, pronouncing those terms as “razzum” and “cazzum,” said, “As long as the razzum is a nose above cazzum, you’re happy. “
In the 1970s and 1980s, unless there were some spikes in value, aviation fuel, the Jet A-1, as the industry calls it, was cheap. As a result, industry concepts to keep razzum above cazzum did not want to live. Too much in the fuel load. Instead, airlines continued their beloved star-shaped style: their elaborate networks featuring trips in only segments. in order to capture the market of flights that serve the surrounding domain. After Delta evolved Atlanta Airport as a hub, for example, a visitor discovered that it was more expensive to fly in the domain with any other airline.
In the hub-and-spoke model, passengers traveled extensively from one hub to another, before dispersing in finer currents to their eventual destinations. To make these center-to-center flights, airlines have ordered jumbo jets like the 747, with the intention of carrying them up to 500 passengers each. These planes were fueled by large amounts of fuel, and the airlines then burned more as they transported their passengers from hubs to smaller airports. But the Jet A-1’s load was so low that at most it didn’t matter. Also, no matter which plane you have flown on, the take-off phase has always been the fastest on the Jet A-1. The fuel efficient peak flight level took place at a cruising altitude, tens of thousands of feet in the air. So it seemed logical to put as many other people as imaginable on a singles takeoff and keep them in the air for as long as imaginable. The problem, however, was that airlines were not always able to fill those large planes to capacity, and they embarked on valuable wars so ruinous to take their seats that Rasm suffered. A 2007 e-book by Adam Pilarski, once a leading economist at airplane maker McDonnell-Douglas, had the pitiful name Why Can’t We Make Money In Aviation?
From the 1990s until the turn of the century, the value of fuel steadily increased, forcing airlines to reconsider their extravagance with the Jet A-1s. In 1989, a barrel of oil charged $10, but in 2008 the value reached $147. In the dubious years after September 11, many airlines monitored the number of passengers, even as they continued to pay for new aircraft ordered years earlier. Normally, airlines may have responded by expanding the value of tickets, unless, since the industry was deregulating everywhere, low-cost airlines have become fierce competition. These carriers have reduced the flight load by cutting off ornaments such as food and legroom. “This revolution was brutal,” Aboulafia said. ” He may not do his business as usual. The cube and radius style also seemed to fade. Each city was building a decent airport for itself and other people didn’t need to waste their time with stopovers and connecting flights. Keeping Casm smaller than Rasm required a new approach.
The main one was to spend less cash on the A-1 Jet. Airlines generally improve their power power by 1% to 2% according to the year, and those gains are earned by modifying the edges: lighter seats, less water in the bathroom tanks. In 2017, when United Airlines reduced the weight of its paco according to its magazine on board, it stored approximately 770,000 litres of fuel according to the year, or $290,000 in costs. Aboulafia told me that about ten years ago, many airlines followed the pressure wash, which reduces the resistance of an aircraft by stripping it of larger amounts of oil, dirt and gas. dead insects that an ordinary moss may never do. In addition, several airlines have started playing in the fuel futures market, to protect themselves from sharp increases in value. Delta bought a complete oil refinery near Philadelphia.
But the real power jumps came through new ships, which airlines began asking brands for in the early 2000s. The Boeing 787, for example, claims to consume 20% less fuel than its predecessor, the 767. Van Hooff recalled how, when KLM incorporated its first 787 into its fleet in 2015 , a pilot accustomed to 747 had been appointed to fly it. To Dubai. ” The 747 is beautiful, however, it burns about 11,000 kilograms of fuel consistent with an hour in a vehicle like this, so it used to see about 100,000 pounds in its garage meter when it entered the cockpit,” Van Hooff said. “I called the office to ask, “Are you really sure that enough is enough?”he knew it. But he can’t exceed his intuition to feel he needed more fuel. “
Airlines have placed the 787 and other new aircraft on point-to-point routes, cutting the center of star networks. Increasingly, Aboulafia said, carriers are buying smaller single-aisle aircraft for those direct flights and getting rid of their old giants. Even before the pandemic, Emirates no longer had to buy Airbus A380, an aircraft that costs $500 million and can carry up to 868 more people, a plane so large that airports have to redo their runway and gates to accommodate it. , British Airways to remove all 31 Boeing 747s from its fleet.
However, valuable tickets were still cheap, and not just because of the cheap airline festival. Peter Morris, former lead economist at Iata, told me that in 1995, 25% of the charge for a valuable ticket was actually spent on its production and sale: courting travel agents, paying commissions, printing valuable tickets safely. The internet has gotten rid of this, replacing it with attrition algorithm battles. Automated internet trackers alert an airline multiple times a day if a competitor reduces its value on a route, so analysts can make a decision if their airline can do the same. Boet Kreiken, who in the past worked for the Dutch Air Force, called the game of courage “mutually trusting destruction. ” That’s one of the reasons other people in the industry kept pretending that airlines make virtually no money.
Morris doesn’t have time for the “fiddle-like crying stories that airlines tell. ” “The fact is that in recent years, the airline industry has never been more profitable. ” The airlines have cut their spending so much and convinced so many other people to fly so occasionally that, despite the low prices, Rasm has outperformed Casm. Last December, the global airline industry had been in the dark for 11 years in a row.
The economic prices of tickets, in fact, are at the center of a ghost maintained by the airline industry for more than 20 years. The ghost is that the cash we pay for a price ticket covers the flight charge in a deeper sense: the charge for our air travel, but also the charge required to the surrounding area, and that booking a flight 42 euros round trip for a Bachelor Party Weekend in Bratislava is nothing more than a thought. The irony of KLM’s announcement for “Fly Responsibly” is that it came here after years of the industry urging us to fly irresponsibly. “Do you still want to see us face to face?” the announcement scolded us quietly, as if airlines hadn’t worked to make us believe that the time we spent face-to-face, presenting a visitor or having lunch with colleagues, was optimal and trivially inexpensive. Then came the coronavirus, the prospect of face-to-face dating evaporated and, for the first time in decades, flying became a luxury.
In the depths of the flight freeze at the end of April, 166 of KLM’s 204 aircraft were grounded. Instead of taking them in cemeteries, KLM made the decision to keep them all in Schiphol: it stopped at the exit gates or parked from one wing to some other zigzag on a track, after metal plates were placed so that the combined weight of the aircraft did not damage the asphalt. The aircraft garage is a fun and sensitive matter. The saying “time is money” is so categorically true in aviation that even long-term stored aircraft will have to stay as close to airworthability as possible, so that they can fly in the air and continue to win their huge prizes.
In an August morning video call, Ton Dortmans, KLM’s head of engineering and maintenance, explained what his team wanted to do to put their planes to sleep in the spring and summer. Fuel tanks have emptied, but not quite: “You still want weight on the plane, because of the strong wind we get here in Amsterdam. For the same reason, the engine fan blades were locked in position with straps, so that on the days of streaks they did not spin indefinitely and use their parts. The water tanks have been emptied. 3D printed blankets for engineers to place in small holes on the aircraft surface, which hide sensors that measure air stress and altitude, protecting them from moisture and insects.
Every seven days, someone got on the plane and operated the engines for 15 minutes to keep them running. The air conditioner was on to keep the humidity at bay. “And tires, well, it’s the same as a car. If you stay a car parked for more than a month, you puncture the tires,” Dortmans said. As a result, a tugboat pulled the aircraft back and forth each month to keep the wheels and axles fit. However, there were some surprises. In the absence of the roar of the jets, the birds began to appear around Schiphol, and one day, a floor engineer told Dortmans that he had discovered a bird that was beginning to nest in a hollow space in the auxiliary feed package. “I hear all those birds and now I locate it, ” he said to Dortmans. “I feel like I’m in the woods. “
Pilots may not be stored in the same way. KLM has 3,000, all of which will have to fly a minimum of hours and perform 3 takeoffs and 3 landings, one and both, 90 days to stay “updated” during the blockade, the floor pilots had to remain their currency through the nine KLM simulators. From the outside, those simulators look like giant motorcycle helmets, and a rider, who got on one and closed the hatch, can go through an immersive practice session for the flight. He spent the summer. At one point, several pilots had gone six months un boarding, and Van Hooff ruled that both, once they flew later, had to do so with a robbery instructor.
Flying their own challenge, because all kinds of regime disappeared from week to week, pilots have noticed that their routes and planes change, and have landed in an ever-evolving matrix of regulations and standards. The regulations were so inconsistent that states required masks, that states allowed team members to leave the hotel, that states required them to stay in their rooms, that van Hooff put a team to work only to update those restrictions several times a day feeding data to aircraft jumping over the Atlantic. A source from some other European airline, which asked to remain anonymous, told me that after a flight to New York at the peak of its infection cycle, the aircraft team felt uncomfortable going to a hotel city at night. Instead, they slept in the elegant business cabin.
A wave of cancellations has arrived. Passenger numbers fell by nine5%, from nine million in the first quarter of the year to 500,000 in the second quarter. To process claims and proofs of factor and consolation, KLM commissioned 800 of its workers to care for the transitory visitor, whether they were acting from their rooms or living rooms. In Manille and Santiago, the call centers released the closures. The staff brought their computers home and answered the calls from there. “It was a double problem, a triple problem,” said Boet Kreiken, KLM’s director visitor experience.
At the end of July, Elbers announced that KLM had lost a record 800 million euros in the first part of the year. The airline won a bailout from the Dutch state: one billion euros in direct loans and another 2. 4 billion euros in government. guaranteed bank loans, all with companyArrayCosts had to be reduced; A new environment had to be fulfilled; The airline had to be restructured. Elbers sent a note to his employees, in which he admitted they were “difficult” and “raw. “
By the end of the summer, the KLM Group had announced between 4,500 and 5,000 long-term task cuts for its 33,000 workers, a combination of redundancies, voluntary retirements and transitional redundancies. The situation has been repeated across the industry. American Airlines plans to eliminate 40,000 tasks from its workforce. British Airways: 12,000 tasks. Qantas: 6000. Ryanair: 3250. La industry will suffer losses of $84. 3 billion this year, Iata estimates, if there is no new outbreak of disease. “It will be a marathon, a sprint,” Elbers continues to warn his colleagues. In his July memorandum to his staff, he proposed only one word as KLM’s most sensible priority: “Survive. “
So far, there has been no complete calculation of the amount of tons of air emissions from which the pandemic has partly moved away, of course, because the pandemic is still ongoing and many aircraft are still stuck. that the cancellation of one million flights in March had eliminated the UK’s one-month carbon dioxide equivalent. In March, I met Andreas Schofer, Professor of Energy and Transport at the Institute of Energy at the University of London. aviation and broadcasts all day, and he had planned to give me a lot of data, but his computer was inactive this afternoon. I did a and then had to communicate about it, set the time while a PowerPoint or pdf took care of it and provided the required numbers.
Between 1980 and 2015, Sch-fer said, aviation emissions increased by 2. 2% consistent with the year. This is not surprising, he noted, because despite the improvement in energy power in recent years, there are more people flying. Much more? He called another document and, five minutes later, said, “Ah, here we go!”In the same 35 years, although aircraft consumed 2% or 3% less fuel year, air transport demand increased to 5. 4% consistent with the year. In this dispute lies aviation’s contribution to the climate crisis.
“It’s not just airlines, even airline brands that are concerned about the CO2 PROBLEM and people’s belief in it,” Schofer said. In 2013, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the United Nations firm setting the criteria for airlines, established a new one three years later, ICAO followed the carbon offset and relief programme for foreign aviation. Corsia, as we know, aims to reduce foreign aviation emissions in part compared to 2005. Airlines have also pledged to buy carbon offsets to offset the superior expansion of emissions beyond 2020.
Additional rewards from a larger engine or a thinner seat will not lead airlines to achieve those goals, and they know it. efficiency, biofuels and a voluntary carbon compensation program, which brings compensatory passenger bills to a reforestation task in Panama. “We have stabilized our carbon emissions and are now in a position to reduce them,” he said. its first advertising flight with bio kerosene, made from used cooking oil, added to its fuel mixture. “It’s not much. Right now, that’s about 0. 2% of all the fuel we use,” he admitted.
Van Veen can describe the steps of progress that can also eventually turn flight into a carbon-free company, however, be careful to point out that this is an extrapolation, which is based on new technologies that will pay off. outside the Netherlands will use a fuel aggregate consisting of 14% biofuel and “synthetic” kerosene, reducing the desire to drill new oil and the emissions emitted by the oil industry in the process. Synthetic kerosene, a fuel made from a refinery, deserves to be manufactured in components from carbon dioxide extracted from the air, so their total emissions will be up to 80% lower than those of the Jet A-1, Van Veen said. Over shorter distances, some aircraft would possibly be hybrids. powered by batteries and fuel. And then, in the middle of the next decade, he said, “we expect a hydrogen-powered aircraft to enter Europe. “The hydrogen plane is the recurring dream of the industry, its equivalent of fusion without blood or driverless car.
But I also spoke to several skeptical people, whether it’s Corsia and all this nascent eco-friendly technology. He thinks Corsia’s goals are timid, which have been set in a way that may not bother the industry much. Corsia’s spine is a carbon offset. Brandon Graver, an international Clean Transport Council researcher, found that most of the cash from the rebates is spent on administrative costs, not real projects. There is even a doubt that these projects will lead to permanent carbon relief, he said. “You hear,” planting trees, planting trees, planting trees,” but only a sure percentage of those trees end up living for more than a year. “He called retribution “modern indulgences. ” We pay for our sins to be forgiven, but also for permission to sin again.
The challenge is that the technologies that can lead us to an era of cleaner flights are not yet within reach. The volume of biofuel and other opportunities being manufactured is incredibly low. Graver’s team calculated in 2017 that all global refueling would keep the world’s aircraft in the air for a total of 10 minutes. (Environmental experts worry that biofuels, made from products like palm oil, will do more harm than they promise to repair. ) If the artificial fuel becomes viable, it will charge more than $ 3 a year. gallon at first, Schäfer told me. “Oil now costs about $ 1 per gallon. So why would airlines buy artificial material? The battery that is small and tough enough to fly across the Atlantic or from Paris to Perth even on the horizon. In the short term, a timescale that is hugely important for replacing the weather, the only way to decarbonize aviation is to fly less. Optionally, it seemed absolutely absurd until this year, when we were forced to be informed to live without a plane.
In the coming years, airlines will be diverted in two other directions. Your earnings will remain low and accumulated; Iata predicts that the number of passengers will not return to pre-pandemic levels until 2023, but others in the industry cite 2024 or 2025 grimly. At the same time, many carriers will have to invest in weather replacement plans, buy compensation or fund research. They have already had to convince ICAO of some of Corsia’s obligations. In Europe, governments have imposed environmental reforms among airline rescue conditions. In one lap for 15 billion euros, for example, Air France is committed to halving domestic atmospheric emissions by 2024 and restricting short-haul flights in which trains run.
In the United States, too, the government has organized a $25 billion aviation rescue plan, even though the 4 largest airlines have spent nearly $40 billion in money over the more than five years just to re-buy percentages and their percentage prices. there were no weather replacement corridors. ” Sustainability in the United States is a little more vital than keeping enough toner in the fax machine,” Aboulafia told me.
But airlines want passengers to repay their ransom loans or their issues. In the United States and Europe, where expansion was already slowing down, the immediate and complete return of consumers is by no means a limited thing. pros. “” Covid offers corporations an explanation of why to reconsider costs,” said Jeff Pelletier, who runs Airline Data, a Houston-based analytics firm. Entrepreneurs account for between 12% and 15% of a plane’s passengers, but sit at the front, so they make a contribution of up to 75% of the benefits of a flight on routes to the destination. “Not all corporations will reduce their spending,” Pelletier said. “But some will. They’ll think they’d rather spend a few bucks on a Zoom assembly instead. “
In Asian countries that add China and India (markets that have grown faster than the maximum of others, flights adjust more), Dennis Lau expects a faster uptick. Lau, a Cirium analyst based in Hong Kong, told me that “climate change is not a component of the industry’s verbal ex-replace here. “Corsica is, for many governments in the region, an example of more Western countries selling environmental criteria that have violated for decades and will obstruct the economic progression of Asian countries. China, India and Russia did not agree to take component in Corsica until 2027. And there are still plenty of doubts about the extent to which Corsia can be applied, Lau said. “What will they do if countries simply refuse to report their emissions?”
In the course of my report, I said that the effects of the pandemic would eventually fade, that the global economy, having been largely opened through affordable flights, might not close again and that other people would get back on the planes. as soon as you think about it, be sure to fly again. But in the meantime, an era of consolidation is glimpsed: more airlines can go bankrupt and more will be bought through larger airlines; airlines will have smaller fleets, Aboulafia wrote in a newsletter; more planes will be smaller, single-aisle. planes flying from one point to another, because if the coronavirus is still hidden, no one needs to spend more time than mandatory on connecting flights or stopover airports. Flying will feel more austere, on those aseptic and functional flights, and more luxurious, because there will be less.
In June, KLM engineers began pulling some aircraft out of hibernation. They replaced leaky toilet faucets, repaired faulty rubber rings, and tested emergency lights. “The penultimate thing we do is check chimney suppression systems and flight controls,” Ton Dortmans, the official KLM engineering leader, tells me. “And then the last thing is: we turn on the engines and turn all the systems back on to see if they work: air conditioning, navigation, all that. For a short period of time, unrestricted return travel seemed possible, however, new episodes of illness gave the impression across the continent. The week when I was supposed to stop at KLM in Amsterdam in mid-August, the British government announced self-disscaling regulations for any traveller returning from the Netherlands, so my vacation failed “You deserve to have been here to see what we were doing,” Dortmans lamented in our video call.
I had proposed an alternative situation for winter. “That’s a question we want to answer now. If it’s a harsh, snowy winter, we might want to reconsider how our planes are parked here. You have to think about water and fuel. ” Dortmans said that if their planes were parked for more than 180 days during the winter, he would think of sending them back, perhaps in Teruel, or maybe at the cemetery in california’s Mojave Desert, where they’re going to be warmer and drier, and where they can wait to locate themselves if they’re going to be searched again.
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