Some people due to fly with regional airline had booked tickets just hours before firm collapsed
“I got an email asking me to check in, and 10 minutes later they had gone into administration.”
Andrew Gibbins was one of hundreds of passengers across the UK who have expressed frustration at regional airline Flybe, which abruptly announced its collapse on Saturday morning, telling any passengers expecting to travel with it not to go to the airport.
Continue reading...Coronavirus has hit few sectors harder than air travel, wiping out tens of thousands of jobs and uncountable billions in revenue. While most fleets were grounded, the industry was forced to reimagine its future
When an airline no longer wants a plane, it is sent away to a boneyard, a storage facility where it sits outdoors on a paved lot, wingtip to wingtip with other unwanted planes. From the air, the planes look like the bleached remains of some long-forgotten skeleton. Europe’s biggest boneyard is built on the site of a late-30s airfield in Teruel, in eastern Spain, where the dry climate is kind to metallic airframes. Many planes are here for short-term storage, biding their time while they change owners or undergo maintenance. If their future is less clear, they enter long-term storage. Sometimes a plane’s limbo ends when it is taken apart, its body rendered efficiently down into spare parts and recycled metal.
In February, Patrick Lecer, the CEO of Tarmac Aerosave, the company that owns the Teruel boneyard and three others in France, had one eye cocked towards China. Lecer has been in aviation long enough to remember flights being grounded during the Sars epidemic in 2003. This year, when the coronavirus spread beyond Asia, he knew what was coming. “We started making space in our sites, playing Tetris with the aircraft to free up two or three or four more spaces in each,” he told me.
Continue reading...Investors pump in funds, loans and deferrals alongside Branson’s £200m injection
Virgin Atlantic has announced a £1.2bn rescue deal to allow Sir Richard Branson’s grounded passenger airline to survive another 18 months and aim to return to profit in 2022, after four months without scheduled flights.
The privately funded recapitalisation package, a combination of cash injections, loans, and deferrals, was finally confirmed on Tuesday after weeks of talks with potential investors, after Virgin’s attempts to garner state support were rebuffed.
Continue reading...IATA warns Covid-19 will cost airlines up to $113bn in revenue this year, as regional airline Flybe collapses, and experts fear others will follow
HSBC has confirmed that an employee has tested positive for the coronavirus, and that some colleagues from its research department have been sent home while the office is deep-cleaned.
A spokesperson says:
We have been informed that one of our employees at 8 Canada Square has been diagnosed with COVID-19. This colleague is under medical supervision and has self-isolated. We are working closely with the health authorities.
We are deep-cleaning the floor where our colleague worked and shared areas of the building. Colleagues on that floor, and others who came into contact with him, have been advised to work at home. Based on medical and official advice the building remains open and operates as normal.
Back at the British Chambers of Commerce annual meeting today, health secretary Matt Hancock said he was working with the Department for Work and Pensions on a way to extend sickness benefit to all workers.
That could including contract workers and the self employed, my colleague Phillip Inman reports.
“It is vital that the same approach applies to all workers,”
Related: PM: workers with coronavirus will get sick pay from day one
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