Quarantine rules delay air travel restart

The global aviation industry has warned it will take at least three years to recover to 2019 levels from the coronavirus pandemic, as flight-shy travellers ensure that both holiday and business air traffic lag well behind any economic recovery. The latest gloomy forecast from the IATA adds to the depressing COVID-19 aviation landscape of grounded fleets, flatlining revenue, depleted cash and job cuts, alongside the threat of punitive social distancing measures, border closures and restrictive quarantine regimes. IATA's baseline scenario is that domestic aviation demand, as measured by revenue passenger kilometres (RPKs), will limp back to 2019 levels by 2022, but international RPKs won't recover until 2024. Even as far out as 2025, global RPKs would still be 10 per cent below what they would have been if they'd followed the expected pre-COVID trajectory. An IATA survey suggested 58% of recent air travellers would initially only undertake domestic air travel, meaning "the impact of the crisis on long-haul travel will be much more severe and of longer duration than what is expected in domestic markets", said IATA DG Alexandre de Juniac. De Juniac said international travel couldn't restart at all if 14-day quarantine measures remain in place. De Juniac said IATA was pushing the global aviation regulator, the International Civil Aviation Authority, to come up with a "risk-based layered approach to biosecurity" that would remove the need for quarantines.<br/>