Emirates Airlines has said that social distancing on aircraft is nice but it's unrealistic. The airline made it clear that establishing social distancing on aircraft by leaving seats empty to curb the spread of coronavirus will lead to a hike in fare and the cost would be too high to bear.
The Middle East's largest airline, which resumed operations in mid-April on a limited network after it halted operations in late March as part of global shutdowns to help contain the spread of coronavirus, plans to fly to 58 cities by mid-August, down from about 157 before the crisis.
According to Emirates' head of corporate communications, Boutros Boutros, "All these talks about social distancing inside the aircraft is nice, But we would like to go back to normal." He said in a business conference in Dubai."
Boutros added, "The economy of the aircraft is built on filling it, filling the seats. I don't think having empty space is going to be an option unless the passenger is willing to pay more. "What we wish for is one thing, but the reality is another." The carrier has been forced to cut a tenth of its workforce in layoffs that could rise to 15 percent or 9,000 jobs.
Before the crisis hit, Emirates employed some 60,000 staff, including 4,300 pilots and nearly 22,000 cabin crew.
Emirates' President Tim Clark has said that it could take up to four years for operations to return to "some degree of normality".
Dubai Airports CEO Paul Griffiths said at the conference that the impact on the city's international airport was "rapid" and "dramatic". "We went from 1,100 flights on a typical day, 280,000 passengers, down to 17 flights in the space of three days," he told attendees, whose chairs were spaced far apart under social distancing guidelines.
He said that 44,000 passengers had gone through the airport in the entire month of May, about the same "that we normally experience in four hours".
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