Pranav Mukul

When will international flights start again? On what factors will the timing and the roadmap depend? What are the concepts of ‘bubbles’ and ‘air bridges’ being considered by global aviation regulators?

The COVID-19 pandemic and its after effects have hit online aggregators hard, particularly those depending on hospitality segments such as hotels, restaurants and air travel.

According to the circular, flying through a swarm can cause problems for aircraft at the time of landing and takeoff with all the air inlets of an aircraft, including engines, air conditioning packs, etc, prone to being damaged by the insects.

Other steps like drastic cost control and a sharp reduction in future supply addition are also in the offing.

As of early Thursday, as many as four passengers, at least two of which were asymptomatic, had tested positive upon arrival.

In total, five companies — Uber India and South Asia, Ola, Zomato, Swiggy and Cure.fit — have together announced the reduction of around 4,441 jobs in the last one month.

The Delhi-Patna route is highest demand, Delhi-Patna most bookings followed by sectors such as Delhi-Bagdogra, Mumbai-Varanasi, Bengaluru-Patna, Delhi-Srinagar.

According to senior people in several companies The Indian Express spoke with soon after the Prime Minister said that every Indian “has to become vocal for their local, not only to buy local products, but also to promote them proudly”, C-level executives scrambled to come up with a plan to get the brand’s messaging across.

The government informed airlines about the “cautiousness” of state governments in allowing people flying into their borders in large numbers. Airlines were asked to display all state-specific information on their websites besides other information necessary for passengers to know ahead of flying.

Five other states – Kerala, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Assam, and the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, have also decided to quarantine passengers upon arrival.

A senior government official, on condition of anonymity, said that the Civil Aviation Ministry has been monitoring the situation in countries like the US, the UK, Italy, the UAE, Singapore, Thailand, etc to assess whether it will be safe to resume commercial operations to these destinations.

Even as the move brings a respite to airlines and the various allied sectors, the limited capacity operations with fare regulation and other added costs have left airlines wanting for more.

While airlines did not offer an official comment on the proposal to cap fares, they said a minimum fare would help only if intrinsic demand was muted, but setting an upper cap could create shortages like that for trains.

India Domestic Flights Resume: The government has allowed airlines to resume flights from Monday albeit only with one-third of the pre-lockdown capacity.

Late on Wednesday night, the Ministry of Home Affairs amended its guidelines on lockdown measures by deleting “domestic air travel of passengers” from the list of prohibited activities. On Sunday, framing the rules for the fourth phase of the national lockdown, it had banned domestic passenger flights until May 31.

Domestic flights resume in India on Monday: Which routes will flights operate on? Are state governments in the loop on operating flights? What are the guidelines for passengers?

Food-tech platform Zomato, which recently asked 13 per cent of its workforce to search for new jobs, has also decided to shut 125 of over 150 offices worldwide. Its rival Swiggy has decided to lay off 1,100 people, in addition to scaling down on kitchen facilities and office infrastructure.

IndiGo has also incorporated a plan for its pilots to report high-level wind and temperature data at different stages of a flight as desired by IMD across all flight operations.

E-commerce platforms see orders for mobiles, garments, pressure cookers, among others.