Coronavirus rules put in place by foreign countries are to blame for delays at major U.K. airports, the Chairman of Parliament’s Transport Select Committee has said. The Telegraph has the story.
Huw Merriman said that airport staff were being overwhelmed by the number of documents they had to process for passengers flying to destinations which still have pandemic-related restrictions in place.
Mr Merriman, the Conservative MP for Bexhill and Battle, said: “At Heathrow, 80% of their destination marketplace still have Covid conditions, so staff on the ground have to check those as well. All of this adds to a very lumpy picture for aviation and sadly it’s the travelling public that are impacted.”
Thousands of holidaymakers have had their flights cancelled or delayed in recent weeks, as airlines struggle to meet a wave of demand for travel after two years of disrupted travel.
A chronic shortage of staff is compounding the problem, as airlines let go of workers during the pandemic and are struggling to tempt them back into the industry.
Hard to believe the Covid travel restrictions in many countries are still in place. What exactly are the countries trying to achieve? Have they still not noticed the vaccinated carry the virus in large numbers? Do they intend the restrictions to be permanent? If not, when do they plan to axe them? The U.S. still has a complete ban on unvaccinated foreign citizens visiting the country. Crazy.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Simple – just don’t travel anywhere that requires papers, passes or any other covid nonsense. Plenty of countries fully open with no restrictions. Vote with your feet.
Exactly. Or drive on the slow roads. Sure, it takes more time, but it’s a whole lot nicer. Ferry ports do very little of the COVID crap, throughout the last two years the ports have been very light touch; freight, y’ see, they don’t dare cause shyte for truckers (apart from in Trudeau’s “Paradise”), and these days most of the truckers can’t speak a word of English or French so it would all be just too much hassle.
Actually it isn’t that simple.
If, like me, you live in a country that still has covid restrictions but want to travel to your home country then there is no other option than to comply with their travel rules.
Thus it is not that ‘simple’.
Where do you live, Judy?
Where is home?
Judy lives in Thailand, Marcus.
Ah, hmm.
Can’t get to the US in our van anyway.
Yes, crazy. I also think the number of pilots and mechanics these airlines might have lost due to their vaccine mandates might be part of the issue.
More vaccinated employees are probably also coming down with Covid and can’t work or must quarantine. Of course, once upon a time, the vaccines were supposed to eliminate this possibility.
Turning up with the wrong documents doesn’t help either.
Total bollox. We flew unvaxxed to Nice yesterday, in theory necessitating LFTs the day before with corresponding email paperwork. Nobody at either end airport mentioned anything about them, didn’t look, didn’t care.
We have flown and driven throughout TheDeadliestPandemic™ and no officials with any real authority ever cared about any of it. Anywhere.
The airline/ferry port staff went through the motions, putting on a very convincing display of “checking things”, but I know for a fact that they didn’t (and couldn’t) actually check any of it.
And we encountered a Hygiene Operative in Lisbon airport who was apparently very angry that we weren’t wearing our masks, but we just smiled. She may have smiled back, couldn’t tell.
And a lady selling train tickets in a station near Cascais got extremely angry when, from behind her enormous two-inch thick glass screen stretching wall to wall and desk to ceiling, she saw me enter without the nappy. Actually, by the end of the exchange, she was very, very angry. Screaming and shouting and foaming angry.
I thought initially that there was only one face nappy visible in that photo.
Upon closer inspection, there are actually five!
STAY SAFE!