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The Biden administration will continue to restrict entry of Europeans and others into the United States, citing concerns that infected travelers may contribute to further spread of the contagious Delta variant across the country, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said Monday afternoon. Concern about the variant had convinced officials not to lift the current travel restrictions on foreigners, Psaki said, some of which had been in place since the beginning of the pandemic. Vaccines remain effective against the worst outcomes of Covid-19, including from the Delta variant. “The more transmissible Delta variant is spreading both here and around the world,” she told reporters, adding that cases are rising in the United States, particularly among the unvaccinated. The decision is a blow to the travel industry, which hoped that a lifting of the travel bans could increase tourism for the remaining summer months, helping hotels, airlines and other businesses that have been struggling. But Psaki said that it was unclear when the United States would remove the bans completely. “I don’t have a timeline to predict for you because it’s all about what success we have at getting more people vaccinated, getting more vaccines out to the world and fighting the virus,” she said. <br/>

US airlines carried 56.6m passengers in May, up 19% over April but still 30% below 2019 levels, the US DoT said on Monday. The airlines carried 27% fewer domestic passengers and 51% fewer international passengers in May versus pre-pandemic May 2019 when there were 81m passengers. Traffic in May was up more than 600% over what US airlines carried in May 2020 during COVID-19 shutdowns when there were just 8m US airline passengers. The data covers the 18 largest US airlines that represent more than 90% of all traffic.<br/>

Of the 2 million people clogging airport security lines and gate areas again each day, one crowd is still largely missing: business travelers. Their absence is noteworthy because they are a key source of revenue and profit, underpinning a record-breaking stretch of financial gain for US airlines that ended with the coronavirus. Business travelers tend to pay higher fares, and that is especially true on international flights, which are also still deeply depressed by the pandemic and travel restrictions around the globe. Because their fares subsidize other passengers, their absence is leading to higher leisure fares on many routes, experts say. Business travelers also spend money on hotels, meals and other things. The US Travel Association estimates that domestic and international business travelers spent more than $300b here in 2019. The group forecasts that dwindled to about $95b last year and won’t fully recover to 2019 levels until 2024. During calls with Wall Street analysts last week, US airlines said business travel has picked up in recent weeks but is still down more than half from this time in 2019. Airlines have been hoping for a major boost in business travel in September, as schools and more offices reopen. Now, however, that optimism is being tempered by the rise in COVID-19 cases around the country fueled the delta variant. “We are encouraged by the trends that we see out there, but we really are planning that a material amount of business travel won’t come back until after the October period,” Vasu Raja, American Airlines’ chief revenue officer, said last week.<br/>

Mexico has signed an agreement with the US FAA aimed at helping the country recover its Category 1 air safety rating, Mexico's ministry of communications and transportation said on Monday. Experts from the FAA will visit Mexico beginning in August to provide technical assistance and a review of the country's efforts to reverse a downgrade, the ministry said. The FAA in May downgraded Mexico's aviation safety rating to Category 2, the lowest level, an action that bars Mexican carriers from adding new US flights and limits the ability of airlines to carry out marketing agreements with one another. The downgrade implied, according to the FAA, that Mexico lacked "necessary requirements to oversee the country's air carriers in accordance with minimum international safety standards, or the civil aviation authority is lacking in one or more areas such as technical expertise, trained personnel, record keeping, inspection procedures or resolution of safety concerns." The US regulator said at the time it was "fully committed" to helping Mexico's aviation authority improve its safety oversight system to international standards and offered to provide expertise and resources. Mexico's communications and transportation ministry said the FAA experts visiting the country would provide a report of their findings and recommendations for further improvement.<br/>

The US FAA said Monday it has imposed new flight restrictions over Afghanistan for US airlines and other US operators in response to the changing security environment. The FAA, in an emergency order effective Sunday, said flights operating below 26,000 feet are prohibited in the Kabul Flight Information Region, which largely covers Afghanistan, unless operating in and out of Hamid Karzai International Airport, citing the risk "posed by extremist/militant activity."<br/>

Brussels said on Monday it had extended rules aimed at avoiding "ghost flights" by carriers trying to keep airport slots as they struggle to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. "As the aviation industry begins to recover from the impact of the Covid-19 crisis, the European Commission remains determined to maintain the relaxation of ordinary slot allocation rules for airlines," a statement said. "The relief will therefore be extended to the next winter planning season, which runs from Oct 31, 2021 to March 27, 2022." The regulation lowers the requirement for airlines to fly at least 80% of the time to hold on to highly-prized take-off and landing slots at airports to 50%. The rules were relaxed last year with the aim of cutting down on the number of empty or near-empty "ghost flights" as airlines carried on flying despite steep drops in passenger numbers. Initially, Brussels gave the carriers a complete waiver for maintaining slots but then hiked the required quota of flights back up to 50% ahead of this year's summer season.<br/>

Airports body ACI Europe has welcomed the EC’s decision to set a 50% slot usage threshold for the upcoming Winter 2021 season, in stark contrast to the condemnation of the move from airlines body IATA. Describing the 50% threshold as “pragmatic and proportionate” – compared with IATA’s insistence that it was ”out of touch with reality” – ACI Europe director general Olivier Jankovec suggests that a higher threshold might have been viable and that he expects the level to increase for the summer 2022 season, before a return to the 80:20 usage rule in Winter 2022. “The aviation sector, having been brought to its knees by the pandemic, can and must now embrace and build upon the green shoots of recovery,” says Jankovec. “And whilst a return to 2019 passenger levels remains a distant vision, our ‘new normal’ does increasingly come with growing levels of stability, thanks to vaccination, certification and testing protocols. This means that a gradual return to slot usage rules, following much needed temporary relief in a time of crisis, is now appropriate.” Jankovec’s positive response follows a markedly negative one from IATA. “The result of these changes will be to restrict the ability of airlines to operate with the agility needed to respond to unpredictable and rapidly changing demand, leading to environmentally wasteful and unnecessary flights,” the airline association said on 23 July.<br/>

The EC on Monday approved Italy’s E800m state aid scheme to compensate airports and ground-handling operators following the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on travel. The compensation, in the form of direct grants, covers the period of March 1 to July 14, 2020. “Airports are among the companies that have been hit particularly hard by the coronavirus outbreak,” the Commission’s Executive VP Margrethe Vestager said. “This 800 million euro scheme will enable Italy to compensate them for the damage suffered,” she said. The EC, the EU competition enforcer, has enabled more government aid since March 2020 to make it easier for companies hit by the COVID-19 pandemic to receive support.<br/>

The UK government will this week consider loosening travel restrictions for travellers from the EU and the US, with one senior airport executive confident that ministers would broaden quarantine exemptions “imminently”. The move, which one government official said was “finely balanced”, would be a boost to the tourism sector and help to reopen the UK to mass foreign travel. Ministers are separately looking at removing France from the newly created “amber plus” category, which requires travellers from the UK to quarantine upon their return, amid hopes that the Beta variant of the coronavirus in that country is coming under control. Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s Europe minister, told Dominic Raab, UK foreign secretary, on Monday in Paris that there was no basis for keeping France on the amber plus list. Raab said decisions were reviewed regularly. The first decision centres on a UK government review of the system for regulating foreign travel, which will conclude this week, and will consider whether fully vaccinated travellers from the EU and US will be able to avoid quarantine in Britain. Government officials said it would be “easier” to apply looser rules to travellers from the EU, which has issued citizens with a digital health pass since the start of this month. One said: “Technically, we are pretty close.” One said that granting the same waiver to US travellers was more complicated because “their system is largely paper-based and is operated by 50 states”. One senior airport executive was confident that ministers would broaden quarantine exemptions to double-jabbed US and EU visitors “imminently”, with transport operators expected to check passengers’ certification before check-in.<br/>

London’s Heathrow Airport and Britain’s main airlines urged the UK to open up travel to vaccinated passengers or face more job losses, as hopes rose that travellers from the US could be given the green light this week. Heathrow CE John Holland-Kaye said Britain could exempt fully vaccinated US citizens from quarantine in the coming days, in what would be a huge boost to the country’s aviation industry which continues to be plagued by uncertainty. Strict rules which the government has previously altered with little notice has meant that Britain’s travel sector remains in the doldrums while Europe’s has partially recovered. Airlines UK warned more aviation jobs would go if the government did not make changes at its next travel review expected later this week. It wants quarantine to be scrapped for fully vaccinated travellers from the United States and the European Union, with more countries added to Britain’s green list for low risk travel. Holland-Kaye noted the EU had opened up unilaterally with the United States, adding: “There’s no reason why the UK shouldn’t do the same. I think that could happen this week.” Heathrow said Britain’s travel restrictions were suppressing trade volumes and traveller demand, pushing its cumulative pandemic losses to $4b.<br/>

Commercial jets delivered by Boeing in 2020 will contribute on average to emissions equivalent to 1m tonnes of carbon dioxide each over their more than 20-year lifespans, data issued by the planemaker showed on Monday. Boeing is the latest company to report so-called Scope 3 emissions that result when customers use their products, amid pressure from investors and climate activists for data on how companies are performing on curbing emissions. Europe’s Airbus took similar steps in February. Together, the world’s two largest planemakers last year delivered jets estimated to be responsible for total emissions equivalent to 600 million tonnes of CO2 over their lifetimes, a figure dampened by lower deliveries during the pandemic. Boeing aims to “significantly reduce our environmental impact during every stage of a product’s life cycle,” CE Dave Calhoun said in a forward to the Chicago-based company’s first-ever sustainability report. Calhoun reiterated that its jets would fly on 100% sustainable aviation fuels by 2030. Jet engines are currently certified to run on a blend up to 50% of the fuel. In the report, Boeing said the commercial airplanes it delivered in 2020 would be responsible for emissions equivalent to 158m tonnes of CO2, or MtCO2e, over their lifespan. That consists of 136 MtCO2e of emissions directly linked to their operation by airlines, and 22 MtCO2e related to the production by energy companies of the fuel used in flight. Story has more.<br/>