Airlines in a Crisis

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. M...

The numbers SAS released in December 2020 reveal only 3/5 cargo income in 2020 compared to 2019. That is 700 million lost and probably a lot more since the potential has shot up.  This is leading one to believe SAS could have done a lot more and that the company haven't taken advantage of what ever they could make money on in the pandemic market. Using the assets they are locked into and are paying for. And this failure of flexibility is ultimately the fault of the CEO Gustafson.  Lack of aggressive local suppliers could be the reason Middle Eastern carriers now is moving into the Scandinavian Cargo market. And once they are in they could be difficult to dislocate. Remember exporters are not as sentimental with what airline they pick as local politicians with their travel expenses refunded by the taxpayer, ref some mayors boycott of Wizz.  One can also see from the numbers how having the actual flying of ones regional network outsourced lead to lack of flexibility in time...

There is things surfacing that indicate the financial expertise within Norwegian was more in getting financing and avoid paying leases rather than in cost control. It sems like different stakeholders have through the years done their besst to milk the company dry thus stopping it from building up profits for a rainy day fund. There are talk about pilots being well paid, sometimes double tariff for working on days off, which indicates that operations and crew control was not too well managed either.  These are growth pains that comes to light in many companies, including Ryanair with their well known roster screw up a couple of years ago. But Ryanair could afford it and have been busy ever since getting out of the union deals the problems led them into, finally mostly resolved by using the CoVid19 crisis to get low low and long term 5 year deals with their staff. In Norwegian on the other hand they who should keep an eye on the bottom line have instead concentrated on getting more f...

Specially Low Fares airlins without distinctly different seat configurations for where passengers can choose to pay more for a more separate seatig arrangements, should at this time consider to give ereryone an option to increase the amount of potential customers. Some have suggested to call the Couldn't Care Less class (CCLc) the CoVid19 class but that could give the wrong associations and suggest the airline actually accept infected people on board. Something that should of course be avoided with all possible measures. Sanitized class (Sc) would have middle seat free and cleaning would be done between each flight. Cleaning would include wiping down all touch surfaces like armrests, tray tables, seat backs and similar, including anything you are likely to touch when boarding and disembarking. In additional each passenger should be supplied with packed sanitizing napkins if they want to do additional wipe downs themselves. They would also board from the front. and their toilets ...

For the time being roster the same crews together to avoid the risk of many sets of crew being infected and out of action. The risk of an asymptomatic crew member becoming a superspreader wandering from plane to plane and infecting a large number of crews should be tken seriously. These asymptomatic superspreaders do not show any sign that would let you stop them coming to work. No temperature and no constant coughs. They are still harbouring the virus and can spread it simply by talking. Or by hand transfer and that would not be stopped by mask wearing. Many crew are young and this increases the percentage of individuals that when infected will be asymptomatic. In addition the hunt for costs among airlines have resulted in a lower than average availability of sick benefits and paid days off, leading to many crew going to work even if feeling slightly under the weather. Actually this behaviour is encouraged by many airlines. You might have many additional crews at this time that...