social distancing on planes “nice” but unrealistic, said the airline. (Representative)
Dubai:
Emirates Airlines said on Thursday that social distancing on planes was not realistic by leaving empty seats to curb the spread of the coronavirus, as the cost would be too high to bear.
The Middle East’s largest carrier, which operates a fleet of 270 jumbo jets, ceased operations in late March as part of global closings to help contain the virus.
Emirates resumed operations two weeks later on a limited network and plans to visit 58 cities by mid-August, up from around 157 before the crisis.
“All these talk about social isolation inside the plane is nice,” said Boutros Boutros, head of corporate communications at Emirates, at a business conference in Dubai. “But … we would like to return to normal.”
“The economy of the plane is based on filling, filling the seats,” he said. “Having (empty) space, I don’t think it will be an option unless the passenger is willing to pay.”
“What we want is one thing, but reality is another.”
The carrier was forced to cut a tenth of its workforce in layoffs which could reach 15%, or 9,000 jobs.
Before the crisis started, Emirates employed around 60,000 people, including 4,300 pilots and nearly 22,000 cabin crew.
President Tim Clark said it could take up to four years for operations to return to “a certain degree of normalcy”.
Dubai Airport CEO Paul Griffiths said at the conference that the impact on the city’s international airport was “rapid” and “dramatic”.
“We went from 1,100 flights on a typical day, 280,000 passengers, to 17 flights in the space of three days,” he told participants, whose chairs were spaced apart from one another as instructed. of social distancing.
He said 44,000 passengers had passed through the airport during the month of May, about the same “as we normally know … in four hours”.
(This story has not been edited by GalacticGaming staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
