Wednesday 29 April 2020

Dear AOA Member,

A number of our non-airport members have been contacting us with new products and services for airports to adapt to the new environment. We have created a dedicated page on the AOA website where we hope to gather these COVID-19-related innovations and ideas. You can view the page here – please share with us a short summary of your solutions and we will post them up there.

Quite understandably, we had a few media calls come in today following British Airways’ announcement of redundancies. We have been outlining the importance of business support measures but also that we need to give passengers confidence to travel again by creating a baseline for health-screening measures, for example on BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme. It is, however, a challenging environment and with others in the aviation and aerospace sectors, such as Airbus, Norwegian and Lufthansa, noting their concerns for the future, it will hopefully prompt Government in setting out how it will support our industry, a point which we will be making to Ministers and officials.

Separately, we have been following up with our work on health screening measures in aviation and have been discussing our ideas with IATA as well, to see where we can align our positions with the airlines. This would act as a starting point for discussions with Government, which are expected to start next week. Ultimately, we need to find the measures that are shown to be medically effective, builds passenger confidence again while being practically deliverable by airports. The latter will hopefully be aided by the ideas and solutions that will be gathered on the AOA website, as I mentioned at the start.

Best wishes,

Karen Dee
Chief Executive