An end to empty seats on Canada’s airlines
Recently, Canada’s two major airlines, Air Canada and WestJet, have been pushing to get more people back on their planes, urging politicians to substantially ease virus-related restrictions, including expanding border travel with the US, as they move to restart additional routes later this month. “This is hundreds of times worse than 9/11, SARS, or the global financial crisis — quite frankly combined,” said Calin Rovinescu, CE of Air Canada. But at the same time that Rovinescu and his counterparts are working to get more people back in the air, they’ve made one change that gives some health officials pause. On Canada Day, both Air Canada and WestJet ended what the industry calls “seat blocking,” leaving a vacant seat between passengers. So while health officials are urging Canadians to keep their distance as various measures are eased, airlines are putting them in close contact in an enclosed space for flights that can last hours. During recent testimony before the House of Commons health committee, officials from all of Canada’s major airlines played down the need to keep passengers apart and emphasized what they called a cascading or multilayered approach to making sure infections don’t spread aboard flights. That approach, they repeatedly said, includes taking into account the quality of the air filtration systems on planes. Air Canada explained the end of seat blocking to me this way: “While we would all like a single measure that reduces risk, we are left to use a combination of approaches to mitigate risk as far as practical.” It added: “It is very important that people understand how efficiently aircraft ventilation works to refresh air regularly onboard every 2 to 3 minutes, which is a key reason there has been no reports of disease outbreak clusters onboard flights.”<br/>
https://portal.staralliance.com/cms/news/hot-topics/2020-07-13/star/an-end-to-empty-seats-on-canada2019s-airlines
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An end to empty seats on Canada’s airlines
Recently, Canada’s two major airlines, Air Canada and WestJet, have been pushing to get more people back on their planes, urging politicians to substantially ease virus-related restrictions, including expanding border travel with the US, as they move to restart additional routes later this month. “This is hundreds of times worse than 9/11, SARS, or the global financial crisis — quite frankly combined,” said Calin Rovinescu, CE of Air Canada. But at the same time that Rovinescu and his counterparts are working to get more people back in the air, they’ve made one change that gives some health officials pause. On Canada Day, both Air Canada and WestJet ended what the industry calls “seat blocking,” leaving a vacant seat between passengers. So while health officials are urging Canadians to keep their distance as various measures are eased, airlines are putting them in close contact in an enclosed space for flights that can last hours. During recent testimony before the House of Commons health committee, officials from all of Canada’s major airlines played down the need to keep passengers apart and emphasized what they called a cascading or multilayered approach to making sure infections don’t spread aboard flights. That approach, they repeatedly said, includes taking into account the quality of the air filtration systems on planes. Air Canada explained the end of seat blocking to me this way: “While we would all like a single measure that reduces risk, we are left to use a combination of approaches to mitigate risk as far as practical.” It added: “It is very important that people understand how efficiently aircraft ventilation works to refresh air regularly onboard every 2 to 3 minutes, which is a key reason there has been no reports of disease outbreak clusters onboard flights.”<br/>
