Cathay Pacific has warned that it is not seeing any “immediate meaningful improvement” in passenger travel demand, as it discloses another dismal month of traffic figures. Still, the troubled carrier notes that recent developments surrounding vaccination and a relaxation of quarantine rules for aircrew based in Hong Kong are welcome. While the airline saw traffic improve year on year in April, it adds that it was still significantly lower than pre-pandemic levels. In its latest traffic results for April, Cathay carried just over 22,400 passengers, representing a 63% increase year on year. However, when compared to pre-pandemic figures in April 2019, it represented a staggering 99.3% decrease. On average, the carrier flew just 747 passengers a day in April. RPKs across the network grew nearly 33% year on year, led by a fivefold increase in traffic from Mainland China. Cathay’s chief customer and commercial officer Ronald Lam says the carrier saw an uptick in demand from the mainland toward the end of the month. This was due to a quarantine-free scheme for returning Hong Kong residents from Mainland China introduced by the city’s government. Capacity for the month rose about 19% year on year, but was nearly 97% down from April 2019 levels. Lam says the Oneworld carrier has been “cautiously” restoring capacity across its network — in April, it resumed regular flights to Chengdu, Xiamen, Kaohsiung, Melbourne and Perth, leading to a 21% month-on-month capacity increase. <br/>
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Qantas will use a different laboratory to screen passengers flying from India to Australia after some of the people stopped from boarding a repatriation flight out of the country later tested negative for Covid-19. But despite a review revealing “issues” with the laboratory used to process the tests, the airline has stood by the initial results that saw nearly half of the 150 people who had been scheduled to board the first repatriation flight out of Covid-ravaged India denied entry to the flight. Forty-two people booked on the first repatriation flight, which landed in Darwin on Saturday, tested positive either in PCR tests in the days prior to departure or rapid antigen tests at the gate. Another 30 were barred as their close contacts. After reports that a handful of people who had been blocked from boarding the flight had later tested negative for the virus, Qantas initiated a review that included re-running all of the positive test results “under additional medical supervision”. The company said late Tuesday that the results had all come back positive, including some “weak positives that may have been interpreted as negative results by other laboratories”.<br/>