Aviation industry opposition to requiring mandatory COVID-19 vaccination for passengers has intensified as impending drug approvals trigger a debate over their role in air travel. Airports Council International, which represents airports worldwide, joined most airlines in calling for a choice between testing or vaccination, fearing a blanket rule imposing pre-flight inoculation would be as disruptive as quarantines. Qantas Airways triggered the debate last week when it said a COVID-19 vaccination would be necessary for passengers on its international flights, which remain largely idle because of Australia’s strict border controls. But other airlines, and now global airports, are worried that waiting for vaccines would bar people from traveling until they are rolled out widely, crippling business in regions, such as Europe that have relatively small domestic aviation markets. “Just as quarantine effectively halted the industry, a universal requirement for vaccines could do the same,” ACI World Director General Luis Felipe de Oliveira said. “While we welcome the rapid development and deployment of vaccines, there will be a considerable period before they are widely available,” he added. “The industry cannot wait till vaccination becomes available worldwide. During the transition period, tests and vaccines together will play a key role on the industry recovery.”<br/>
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The WHO does not recommend countries issuing “immunity passports” for those who have recovered from COVID-19, but is looking at prospects of deploying e-vaccination certificates like those it is developing with Estonia. Estonia and the UN health agency in October started a pilot project for a digital vaccine certificate - a “smart yellow card” - for eventual use in interoperable healthcare data tracking and to strengthen the WHO-backed COVAX initiative to boost vaccinations in developing countries. The reality of vaccinations is growing, since Britain on Wednesday approved a COVID-19 shot from Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech, while other companies Moderna and AstraZeneca have delivered positive trial data amid their push for approval. “We are looking very closely into the use of technology in this COVID-19 response, one of them how we can work with member states toward an e-vaccination certificate,” said Siddhartha Datta, Europe’s WHO programme manager for vaccine-preventable diseases.<br/>
The US passenger and cargo airline industry saw total employment fall by nearly 29,000 workers through the month ending in mid-October as government restrictions on laying off workings expired. The US Transportation Department said US airlines employed 673,278 workers in mid-October, which was 81,749 fewer than in March when US travel demand started falling dramatically due to the coronavirus pandemic. The department said that since March, United has reduced its workforce by 32%, or 29,243 employees, while Delta eliminated 32% of its jobs, or 28,751 employees. <br/>
Business travellers and performing artists are to be exempted from quarantine in a bid to help revive the economy, Grant Shapps has announced. The Transport Secretary granted the exemption from 4am on Saturday to British and foreign business executives who could deliver “significant” benefit to the UK economy. UK and international performing artists, TV production staff, journalists and elite sportsmen or women newly-recruited to team “bubbles” will also gain exemptions, alongside the specialist staff already free from quarantine. The move was recommended by the Government’s global travel taskforce which warned business travel would be the slowest to recover after lockdowns. Business travellers accounted for 22% of all the UK’s 38m inbound visits a year before the pandemic and contributed GBP4.5b to the economy. However, most inbound business travellers spend fewer than three days in the UK, so that even the reduction of quarantine to five days through the introduction of test and release from December 15 was unlikely to have had a major impact. The transport department has devised three categories to define “significant benefit,” starting with senior executives of multinational firms visiting their UK subsidiaries with more than 50,000 employees in Britain, whose jobs could be safeguarded by their trip. Second are returning UK based executives whose exemption would be granted for “specific activity” which would “create and/or preserve” 50,000 UK jobs. Third are foreign-based executives or their representatives seeking to make a GBP100,000-plus investment in the UK, place a contract with a UK business with a value of GBP100,000 or more, or entrepreneurs setting up a new business within the UK that would create 50,000-plus jobs.<br/>
Almost two-thirds of pilots who received alerts of a potential mid-air collision with another plane were found to have responded incorrectly, prompting labor groups to issue a warning and ask for more training. According to a report by Eurocontrol, which is responsible for the oversight of European airspace, only 38% of aviators in the region followed the correct procedure when notified of a potential incident by a plane’s Traffic Collision Avoidance System. Eurocontrol examined 1,184 cases over a 12-month period. TCAS has been credited with dramatically reducing the risk of planes colliding during flight and is required on all airliners around the world. The device communicates with systems on other jets and, if a collision is imminent, either tells pilots to climb or descend. Yet in practice, more than one-third of pilots did the opposite of what they were instructed, the data show. The findings prompted the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Association and International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers Association to issue a joint advisory to their members, telling them to follow the commands and not assume aircraft they can see outside are the ones on the TCAS display. Aircraft operators and training providers should make the practice the focus of recurrent sessions, they said.<br/>The system was designed after several high-profile mid-air collisions in the US that occurred in spite of efforts by air-traffic controllers to keep planes apart. <br/>
The father of a young woman who died in the Boeing 737 Max crash last year says federal officials told victims' families approval of the beleaguered aircraft is “imminent.” Transport Canada's head of civil aviation informed family members in a virtual meeting Wednesday the department is on the cusp of validating changes to the plane - already cleared for takeoff in the United States - said Chris Moore, who lost his 24-year-old daughter Danielle in the tragedy. The Max has been grounded in Canada since March 2019, when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 plummeted to the ground six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board in the second of two Max crashes less than five months apart. Moore said he is concerned the review processes that led regulators to green-light a fatally defective plane remain in place. “They basically said they have one or two minor things to go over,” Moore said. “But we still don't know exactly how they're going to reform the way that they validate these airplanes.”<br/>
The FAA is requiring 787 operators to update aircraft flight manuals to include new localiser-approach procedures. The move follows several incidents involving 787s crews experiencing issues during localiser approaches to Hong Kong, and comes after the FAA addressed 787 localiser issues in a 24 September airworthiness bulletin. The agency outlined new required procedures in an airworthiness directive (AD) made public on 3 December. The new procedures call for crew, when conducting localiser-based approaches, to “monitor localiser raw data and call out any significant deviations”, the AD says. “Perform an immediate go-around if the airplane has not intercepted the final approach course as shown by the localiser deviation,” it adds. The AD applies to all three 787 variants and takes effect on 18 December. It responds to reports in which 787 autopilot flight director systems (AFDS) failed to “transition to the instrument landing system localiser beam”, it says.<br/>