I'd love to fly away, but not just yet

It is Day 35 of the COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom. Since it began I have started a new job, lost almost a stone in weight and, thanks to tauntingly sunny weekends spent in the garden (not Richmond Park) I’m showing the first brown shoots of a tan. In April. This not-going-out-further-than-the-back-door regime has entailed a lot of looking up into geographically unfamiliar Tuscan-blue skies over south-west London, a vista seemingly unblighted by the ever-present traffic pollution that hangs over the city. 

Another notable absentee has been the air traffic that usually, at certain times of the day, takes off from Heathrow in a south-easterly direction and over our house. Being a bit of a plane geek (I spent many happy hours of school holidays on the roof of Heathrow’s Terminal 3 logging tail numbers in the days when such things were allowed), I’ve been fascinated by the stark reduction in aircraft overhead. What has been taking off has been the occasional passenger flight to eastern Europe or Middle East destinations, while the flight radar app on my iPad has shown that UK commercial airspace is mostly being used by cargo planes. Environmentalists will, of course, be delighted: the blue skies and reappearance of wildlife to suburban gardens is just the return to pre-industrial times they long for. You can’t help, either, enjoying sitting in a garden with the only noise pollution being birds tweeting and children letting off steam in a distant backyard. 

It does, though, makes you wonder how we might return to normal, and what the next normal will be. I’ve always looked at planes in the sky as a symbol of escape, of getting to be somewhere else, somewhere more interesting. And with what should be the holiday season approaching, and the lockdown showing no signs of being lifted, the chances of seeing the outside tables of a Greek taverna, a Sicilian trattoria or a Spanish tapas bar anytime soon seem depressingly limited. Not that I’m craving flying anywhere. The experience of my last job disproved wholesale the idea that it’s better to travel than arrive, and even, to travel at all: in the 12 months between September 2018 and September 2019 I took 51 flights, a ridiculous programme, especially in terms of my carbon footprint, but also in arcane face time philosophy. 

If one good thing has come out of this coronavirus crisis, it’s that the Internet hasn't broken and video conferencing technology is more than adequate at keeping in touch professionally and socially. The first few weeks in my new job may have been a bit weird, in that I’ve seen more of the interiors of my new colleagues’ homes than in any previous job in my 34-year career, but that hasn't stopped being able to function perfectly adequately. Of course, if you work in a job where collaboration and spontaneous engagement is productive, e-mail, Skype and instant messages are a little limiting, but nowhere near the inhibition some might have argued they were. There’s no immediate sign that I’m going to set foot any time soon in my company’s Paddington offices, and I'm fine with that. Our technology is holding up brilliantly, everyone is making the best of it, and it has even fostered an uplifting bunker spirit. Going back into the office will be a challenge for employers, especially as they ensure safer social distancing in communal areas, in canteens, meeting rooms and lifts. The average desk distance in most modern offices is around 1.5 metres, which would require new thinking by corporate real estate planners if employees are to come back. 

Picture: British Airways

So if we’re still, as a nation, wisely reluctant to get on public transport again to get to work, I can’t see much appetite for getting on a flying toothpaste tube for a couple of hours or more for leisure. The other week it was reported that IATA, the international airline trade association, had suggested that for mass air travel to resume, airlines would be forced to fly with at least a third of their planes’ seats empty, with middle seats on single-aisle, three-abreast configuration short-haul flights left vacant to maintain social distancing. Michael O’Leary, the outspoken Ryanair chief executive has branded the idea “idiotic” and said it offered little benefit in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. O’Leary’s airline, of course, has benefited more than most from packing ’em in, last year flying more than 152 million people, placing it at the top of European carriers by passenger numbers. “We can’t make money on 66% load factors,” O’Leary has said. “Even if you do that, the middle seat doesn’t deliver any social distancing, so it’s kind of an idiotic idea that doesn’t achieve anything anyway,” he told the Financial Times. As we've seen with Richard Branson's attempt to have the UK government support Virgin Atlantic financially in the crisis, a well-paid airline CEO complaining about not making money is not going to wash too well. 

When life returns to normal for the airline industry - if it returns to normal - things will clearly be different. Business travel still accounts for the bulk of airline profits, but with video-based professional distancing being accepted like never before and, ideally, remaining the default, non-essential trips abroad for work are going to be pared back, and that’s even before CFOs impose even more draconian travel restrictions as the financial crisis grips harder. The future is certainly looking bleak for the airline industry, even if a partial lifting of the lockdown frees up the leisure travel market. Michael O’Leary believes that normality could return if airlines adopt Asian practices and force passengers to wear face masks, and airports bring in mandatory temperature and even virus testing. That still won’t stop airlines collapsing. The Airport Operators’ Association has said that passenger numbers are unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels until 2022. British airports have seen passenger numbers slump by 97%, with up to 80% of staff being furloughed in some cases.

All this, though, assumes that 'normality' will be anything like that we enjoyed as little as a few weeks ago. There are, for now, too many variables, and even if lockdown rules in all those countries affected by this pandemic start to relax, what that relaxation will be like, and how long it will remain in place before a second phase of COVID-19 forces us back behind our front doors again is anyone's guess. The extreme view of the world today is that the virus has initiated a form of Pol Pot's Year Zero regime. It's not, obviously, but the absence of planes in the skies, and even traffic on our roads, may be one of the things that doesn't recover. Bad news for the airline industry, which has enjoyed an unprecedented boom in the last couple of decades. Bad news, too, for the likes of Boeing and Airbus, who were pumping out new planes at a rate of knots until relatively recently (Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury told his 133,000 employees in a letter last Friday that the business was “...bleeding cash at an unprecedented speed, which may threaten the very existence of our company”). It is, though, conceivable that the world will start moving again. Chinese tourists will still want to visit Paris, Americans will still want to have their photographs taken outside Buckingham Palace, and I for one will still want to see the Mediterranean again. Just not yet.