One in every of Asia’s largest airways, Cathay Pacific, was compelled to cancel a few of its passenger flights to Hong Kong after a few of its crews refused to observe the service’s quarantine guidelines.
Hong Kong is making an attempt to pursue a “Covid-zero” technique in a push to reopen its border with mainland China. As Hong Kong’s residence service, Cathay Pacific has been keen to help authorities on this transfer, asking its cabin crews and pilots to volunteer for a so-called “closed-loop” system in December. This concerned working for 3 weeks in a row, staying in Hong Kong solely briefly, earlier than a two-week quarantine on their return.
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Nonetheless, the corporate seems to have had too few volunteers to function this schedule as many wish to be residence for Christmas. Because of this one-third of the service’s flights will now be transformed to freight as a substitute of passenger transportation.
“The operational and journey restrictions that stay in place proceed to constrain our capacity to function flights as deliberate. We’re consolidating our passenger flight schedule for December 2021, together with canceling various flights to Hong Kong,” a spokesperson for Cathay Pacific mentioned. The corporate will organize different bookings on remaining passenger flights to accommodate shoppers whose flights had been canceled.
Regardless of Hong Kong’s strict quarantine laws, Covid-19 instances maintain reappearing, with three Cathay Pacific cargo pilots not too long ago testing constructive after arriving from Frankfurt. Two instances of the brand new southern African Covid-19 variant, which has already induced a number of EU states to reintroduce journey restrictions, have additionally been present in vacationers beneath quarantine, Hong Kong’s Division of Well being introduced on Friday.
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