Few european airlines have covered themselves with glory in times of a global pandemic

How many airline have ben supportive as governments around the world have tried to handle a worldwide pandemic crisis.

Today KLM tried to force the retraction of the dutch governments demand of negative tests even for crew by threatening to stop all it's Transcontinental and even european flying that would demand a crew layover to not risk that a crewmember with a postitive test was left behind. A behaviour more akin to O'Leary trying to change tax hikes by dropping all routes from certain airports than a national airline having the word Royal in its name. Even coming with stories how they have to stop trans-shipping vaccines to countries in South America with tremendous Covid19 problems.

Apart from the sudden concern over crew, that was lacking before, can't see why KLM couldn't operate flights with double, or treble or quarduple or whatever it takes, sets of crews so no crew leaves the plane or stays over and everybody comes back. To at least bring out the vaccines. Many other airlines did it early on in the pandemic to amongst other bring back ppe from China.

Apropo Ryanair have spent most of the pandemic fighting both Irish and UK governments at every turn. REjecting implementing any measure with a cost implications. Even taking the Irish government to court and loosing badly. Latest from them was to demand a set end date for pre flight CoVid19 testing even before Britain had implemented the measure.

Also the now former IAG chief was early on quick to follow O'LEary's example of complaining loudly to anyone that would listen about all the terrible restrictions and the lack of compensation. There are two made from the same lest. A stance of course quickly adopted byIATA, where he is now the chief.

Other European airlines have been very slow with voluntarly implementing measures. and all have resisted the social distancing measure middle seat free. Not even as a optional payable add on have any of them offered it. 

Haven't seen one of them come up with a measure of their own accord. Instead its wild exaggerations of cleaning measures that supposedly last 24 hours, so they don't have to do anything between each planeload of passengers. And full advantage of that it is very difficult to pinpoint where each CoVid19 positive actually got infected by proclaiming none had ever been infected on an airplane. And when that was counterprooven that very few got infected during travel compared to something else. Anything actually that had a significant number of cases that week. Completely ignoring the large amount of imported infections many counties see. It was all imported in the first place when it comes to it. And how fast new strains seem to travel across borders.

And when they are given handouts from public cofers the immediate cry is to little and we want more.

Then there is the more responsible behaviour of US airlines where some even have seen pandemic measures as a possibility of making themselves stand out in a time of crisis. And that in a country where the overall political response has at times been lacking. Few of them are what one would call traditional flag carriers. But some of their bosses are aware of their national repsonsibilities and specially when theyr are helped with billions of dollars from state coffers to keep going. 

There is no doubt that with more proactivity from the airlines and faster adoption of the measures instead of immediate reactions of throwing the toys out of the pram, this pandemic could have been less devastating than it is becoming.

It also seems many airline chiefs, and politicians, have forgotten about when flu and cold seasons normally comes around and to plan accordingly. After all CoVid19 is a cold behaving like an extra bad flu.