Flight risk

Pictures: Twitter/Sean Mallon

I don't know about you, but one of the things I've struggled with the most during this lockdown is the sight, in television programmes clearly recorded before the crisis, of people crowded together. As we endure a seventh week shut indoors, studiously avoiding all other human contact apart from those we live with and (on a Thursday evening) those we live opposite, a crowded pub scene in EastEnders just looks plain weird. So, when Aer Lingus passenger Sean Mallon tweeted pictures of his packed flight from Belfast to London earlier this week, I thought it was a mistake. The cabin looked normal, i.e. rows of three-abreast seating with passengers sat shoulder-to-shoulder. That might have been normal once, when flying was almost as routine as getting on a bus, but not now, not when commercial air travel has dropped off a cliff, so to speak.

The thought of spending any amount of time in a cabin, breathing recycled air at 30,000ft, fills me with dread. Come to think of it, I can't even contemplate getting on a plane in the first place. The whole process of flying, from check-in to passport control at the other end, involves queuing. Airports, especially one like Heathrow, handling hundreds of flights a day in normal times, are usually a hive of human activity, when you add up passengers, the families seeing them off or greeting them, and the vast numbers of workers, all under the same roof at the same time. No wonder John Holland-Kaye, Heathrow’s chief executive, has said that social distancing at an airport like his would be impractical. "Forget social distancing, it won't work in aviation or any other form of public transport,” he wrote this week in the Daily Telegraph. “The problem is not the plane, it is the lack of space in the airport. Just one jumbo jet would require a queue a kilometre long.”  Holland-Kaye has called on world leaders to agree a "common international standard" to put new health and safety rules in place to get air travel moving again. These, he said, should include mandatory health checks for passengers and "fantastic levels of hygiene" in airports to minimise the risk of infection.

This does, though, draw attention to the issue of the role aviation has played in the UK's succumbing to COVID-19 to begin with and, as we now know, reaching the grim milestone of exceeding 30,000 deaths from the virus, the highest death toll in Europe and second only to the United States in world rankings. For the sake of drama, it should also be pointed out that the UK represents less than 1% of the world's population and, yet, now accounts for nearly 12% of reported COVID-19 deaths. The UK is, obviously, an island, and without going down a Faragist route on border controls, our airports have continued to accept planeloads of passengers arriving from all over the world throughout the time the virus has been amongst us. Figures obtained by The Guardian found that only 273 people out of 18.1 million travellers were quarantined in the UK in the three months before the lockdown, a period when the spread of infection was already known, including a "big influx" from so-called hotspots in Italy and Spain. Many of these arrivals were only advised to self-isolate if they had any symptoms. Sir Patrick Vallance, the government's chief scientific officer, recently told MPs that biological mapping of COVID-19 infections revealed that UK cases have come from all over the world, but the emphasis on European origins is particularly alarming. "Whether that was people returning from half-term, whether it is business travellers or not, we don’t know," Vallance told the Health & Social Care Select Committee. "A lot of the cases in the UK didn’t come from China and didn't come from the places you might have expected. They actually came from European imports and the high level of travel into the UK around that time."

Even now, Heathrow Airport is only just starting to trial temperature detection cameras, and even then, initially only in Terminal Two as part of an effort to screen passengers. If the trial proves successful, the equipment will then be rolled out throughout the airport. However, with air traffic at the airport now down by as much as 80%, you get a sense that the stable door slammed shut a long time ago. Data has suggested that the countries who closed their borders early in the crisis have done better in controlling the virus locally. Norway and Denmark closed their borders in mid-March within two weeks of recording their first cases of COVID-19, and both countries have had only 40 and 87 deaths per million people. For comparison the UK's rate is 433 per million. Sir Patrick Vallance told MPs that SAGE, the government's scientific advisory body, had advised that ministers would have to be "extremely draconian" in blocking travel from entire countries, otherwise "it really was not worth trying to do it". That point of view was underlined by security minister James Brokenshire who told the BBC that "the scientific advice was very clear" and that "up to this point in time, placing restrictions at the border would not have had any significant impact on epidemic progression in the UK". Some scientists have, however, argued that banning travel would have made little difference. Even if there is a strong suggestion that Brits returning from half-term skiing trips to Italy may have played a part in the island's outbreak, there are many more variables that, ultimately determine the scale of any outbreak.

Whatever the arguments about what did or didn't happen, the damage has been done. 30,000 lives won't come back. The economy will return, though how and when is anyone's guess. The aviation industry will be a key component, though how much compared with before is up for debate, given that no-one is yet predicting what any semblance of normality will look like. With airlines facing bankruptcy and those who survive more than likely to raise prices - which, to be fair, they're more than entitled to do - the relative freedom with which we've been able to jet off to places or jet in from may be over for a long time. Even if technology and strict safety measures at airports and on planes themselves could be effectively applied, public confidence in flying is still to be tested, although Sean Mallon's fellow passengers seemed, apparently, at ease being sardined onto that Aer Lingus flight.