Emirates faults social distancing on flights

Emirates airline has described as unrealistic the move to establish social distancing on aircraft by leaving seats empty to curb the spread of coronavirus, saying the cost would be too high to bear.

The Middleeast’s largest carrier, which operates a fleet of 270 wide-bodied aircraft, halted operations in late March as part of global shutdowns to help contain the virus.

Emirates resumed operations two weeks later on a limited network and plans to fly to 58 cities by mid-August, down from about 157 before the crisis.

Commenting on the development,  Emirates’ head of corporate communications, Boutros Boutros stated: “All this talk about social distancing inside the aircraft is nice. But we would like to go back to normal. The economy of the aircraft is built on filling it, filling the seats. Having the space (empty), I don’t think is going to be an option unless the passenger is willing to pay. What we wish for is one thing, but the reality is another.”

The carrier, which has been forced to cut a tenth of its workforce in layoffs that could rise to 15 per cent, or 9,000 jobs, before the crisis hit, had employed some 60,000 staff, including 4,300 pilots and nearly 22,000 cabin crew.

The president of the airline, Tim Clark, has said that it could take up to four years for the airline’s operations to return to some degree of normality.

Meanwhile, while reacting to negative impact of COVID-19, the Dubai Airports Chief Executive Officer,  Paul Griffiths, has declared that the impact on the city’s international airport was “rapid” and “dramatic”, saying: “We went from 1,100 flights on a typical day, 280,000 passengers, down to 17 flights in the space of three days”.

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