Ibn Battūta, Moroccan Explorer of Dar al-Islam and Beyond: The World’s Most Prodigious Wayfarer of Pre-modern Times

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Geography, International Relations, Regional History, Travel, World history,

Everyone’s heard the story of Marco Polo, his epic journey from Venice via the Silk Road to Cathay (China) and the court of Kublai Khan, and further explorations in Southeast Asia as the Great Khan’s foreign emissary, but much less well known outside the Maghreb and the Middle East are the more impressive peregrinations—in terms of immenseness of scope and distance—of the Moroccan Islamic traveller Ibn Battūta.

Marco Polo’s ‘Travels’

Battūta was born in Tangier, Morocco, into a Berber family of legal scholars about 50 years after Marco Polo’s birth. In 1325 the youthful Battūta set off alone initially with the purpose of undertaking the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca, but circumstance and curiosity took the Moroccan scholar on a seemingly never-ending series of extended side trips. Over the next 29 years Battūta’s travels took him on a wide arc to the East, visiting virtually all of the Islamic lands including far-off Sumatra (in modern Indonesia). Battūta’s sense of adventure and desire to learn about distant lands led him to extend his journey far beyond Dar al-Islam (the lands of Islam) to visit Dar al-Kufr (the non-Muslim world). As an Islamic scholar Battūta’s travel to ‘infidel’ lands was legitimised by the Islamic principle of Talab al-‘ilm (“search for knowledge”) (Berman, Nina. “Questions of Context: Ibn Battuta and E. W. Bovill on Africa.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 34, no. 2, Indiana University Press, 2003, pp. 199–205, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4618304).

Battūta’s travels (Image: ORIAS – University of California, Berkeley)

Battūta’s world
Ibn Battūta’s adventure-packed travels—sometimes on foot, sometimes by sea, often for safety in the company of camel caravans—took him to the lands occupied today by 40 modern countries. Divided into two journeys, the first encompassed North Africa, Central Asia and Russia, the Middle East and Anatolia, India and South Asia, the Maldives, East Africa (down as far as modern Tanzania), Southeast Asia and China. A later, shorter journey took him into the Mali Empire and West Africa (crossing the Sahara to Niger, Timbuktu, etc) and later to Moorish-inhabited Spain.

The top three travellers in Pre-modern history – measured by distance

• Ibn Battūta (Islamic scholar and explorer) approx. 117,000 kilometres
• Zheng He (Chinese admiral and explorer) approx. 50,000 kilometres
• Marco Polo (Venetian merchant and explorer) approx. 24,000 kilometres

(‘Ibn Battuta’, Wikipedia entry; John Parker World Book Encyclopedia, 2004)

Image: www.history.com

Unreliable memoirs
Although Battūta clocked up a phenomenal amount of mileage for a traveller in the Medieval age, many modern scholars believe that Battūta did not visit all of the destinations listed on his Rihla✡ itinerary, the narrative of his journeys. Amikam Elad for instance contends that Battūta plagerised large parts of the travel narrative including the description of Battūta’s travels in Palestine from another Muslim traveller Muhammad al-‘Abduri (Elad, Amikam. “The Description of the Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa in Palestine: Is It Original?” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 2, [Cambridge University Press, Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland], 1987, pp. 256–72, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25212152). Doubts also exist about his visits to the city of Sana’a in Yemen, Bolghar via the Volga River and Khorasan et al. Some academics contend that in China Baṭṭūṭa only ever got as far as Quanzhou and Canton. Another false claim was that he witnessed the funeral of the Mongol Great Khan (the reality was no emperor died during Battūta‘s sojourn in China). The Moroccan storyteller borrowed liberally from hearsay evidence in the accounts of earlier Muslim explorers, and from his illustrious Venetian predecessor – the Rihla reveals many similarities in themes and commentataries to Marco Polo’s Travels.

Marco Polo, adapting to Tartar dress

Polo/Battūta overlap
Both Marco Polo and Ibn Battūta were in a sense oral historians, neither travellers penned a single word of the books they are famous for, instead dictating their travel stories to a scribe. Battūta’s tendency to rely on hearsay to describe some places he didn’t visit (eg, the Great Wall of China) mirrored the larger-than-life Venetian storyteller’s inclinations – Polo described the small island of Ceylon thus, “for its actual size, is better circumstanced than any island in the world”, despite never having set foot on Ceylonese soil (Marco’s contemporaries were well aware that “il Milione” was given to exaggeration).

Battūta/Juzayy’s ‘Rihla’

Battūta’s ghostwriter
As Ibn Battūta never kept a journal during his nearly three decades of travel, the Marinid sultan of Fez commanded him to collaborate with court poet Ibn Juzayy who wrote the manuscript of what became A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling☯ based on Baṭṭūṭa‘s recollections. The title was later shortened for convenience to the Rihla☮. The travel book has transparent shortcomings, the format is undercut by extreme chronological inconsistencies. The travelogue relies on Battūta’s memory—Morgan points out that the memory of a traveller understandably may lapse especially if the travels stretch over such a large passage of time (Morgan, D. O. “Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and the Mongols.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 11, no. 1, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 1–11, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25188080).

Wives, concubines and divorce
A curious side feature of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s global footprint is the disclosure in the travelogue of various personal relationships he entered in to. Baṭṭūṭa on arriving at a new town regularly married women and took countless concubines, leaving the (divorced) wives and some of his issue as well behind when he moved on. For an observant Muslim Baṭṭūṭa includes a surprising level of sexual detail pertaining to the local women he encounters on his journeys (Singer, Rachel, ‘Love, Sex, and Marriage in Ibn Battuta’s Travels” (2019). MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference. 1. http://commons.lib.jmu.edu/madrush/2029/love/1).

Though the Rihla was in essence intended as the devotional work of a pious Islamic scholar, its real value lies in its secular insights into the world of the Middle Ages…providing descriptions of diverse and far-flung countries’ geography, personalities, politics, cultural practices, sexual mores and the natural world (‘The Longest Hajj: The Journeys of Ibn Battuta’, Douglas Bullis, Aramco World, July-August 2000, www.archive.aramco.com).

(Photo: History Extra)

In the 1350s after Ibn Battūta had finally had his fill of wanderlust and hung up his walking sandals for good, he settled into an altogether sedentary vocation, appointed as a Qadi (Islamic judge) in his hometown of Tangier.

(Source: Blackstone Audio Inc)

Endnote: Polo and Battūta didn’t invent fabrication and embellishment in travel writing. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (5th century BCE)—considered both the “father of history” and the world’s ur-travel writer from—was prone to mixing in ”legends and fanciful accounts” to his Histories (Euben, Roxanne L. “LIARS, TRAVELERS, THEORISTS: HERODOTUS AND IBN BATTUTA.” Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 46–89, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7t5dw.7).

————————————————————————————————————————
✡ literally the ‘Travels’

☯ the travelogue’s proper title

☮ the word Rihla strictly speaking refers to a genre of Arab literature rather than the name of the travel book (Bullis)

A Female Helicopter Trailblazer, the “Whirly Girls” and the Struggle for a Place in the Cockpit: Women in the ‘Contrails’ of Modern Aviation

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Aviation history, Gender wars, Society & Culture, Travel

When the first men managed through repeated trial-and-error to get manned “flying machines” off the ground, the first women pioneers weren’t that far behind them in getting into the skies. The first woman got her flying licence (Elise Deroche in France) less than nine years after the Wright brothers made their epic 59-second ‘hop’ – see the 2017 brace of articles elsewhere on this blogsite, Equality at 10,000 Feet: The Pioneer Aviatrix in the Golden Age of Aviation – Part I (May 27, 2017) and Part II (May 31, 2017).

Baroness Derouche (Source: This Day in Aviation)
🔺Reitsch testing the FW-61 (Photo: ullstein bild via Getty Images)

While many women overcame obstacles on the way to a career as an aviatrix, those of their sex wanting to become helicopter pilots have found it even more difficult and onerous. The prospects around 1940 when the world’s first modern rotary-wing copter became fully functional looked bright enough for women. Nazi Germany’s pioneering aviatrix Hanna Reitsch was leading the way. In 1938 Reitsch☸ became the first woman to test fly a helicopter, Focke’s FW-61 helicopter, even going on to set a distance record for helicopter flight of 109km. She followed that up with the record (shared  with another pilot) for being the first in the world to fly a copter in an enclosed space❇ (Sophie Jackson, Hitler’s Heroine, Hanna Reitsch (2014)).

🔺 Reitsch’s 1955 autobiography

Unfortunately, as the industry has grown since those formative days, female helicopter pilots trying to follow the trajectory of Reitsch’s stellar achievements in the air have found it much harder to penetrate the masculine preserve of the helicopter world. Today women still lag far behind in the gender stakes, in 2019 according to the Civil Aviation Authority women made up only 4.5% of the helicopter pilots in the UK, with just the single female instructor-examiner for the whole country (“International Women’s Day: ‘I’m teaching other women to fly helicopters’”, BBC, 08-Mar-2019, www.bbc.com).

(Photo: Stephanie Wallace/IMdiversity)

The statistics are hardly more encouraging in the US. The Helicopter Association International puts the number of female pilots at around 5%, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) which pointedly has no specific data on women helicopter pilots estimates the figure at a perhaps generous 7.9%. (‘How These 2 Women Became The Helicopter Pilot and Reporter Inside Skyeye’, ABC13, 11-Mar-2021, www.abc13.com). Even more concerning, the percentage of women behind the controls has been stagnant over recent decades✴.

But it’s not from the lack of trying to effect change on the part of women aviators! The barriers to female entry into both the commercial and military fields of helicopters led pilot Jean Ross Howard Phelan (above), the 8th US woman to gain her helicopter accreditation, to form Whirly Girls International in 1955—an association dedicated to the advancement of women in helicopter aviation—with just 12 other charter members🈂. Today the group has 72,000 members from 44 countries.

The minuscule inroads made by women inside the sanctum of the “male cockpit” isn’t confined to rotary-wing aircraft. Women pilots have barely had more success in cracking the fixed-wing aircraft industry, their share of the jobs in the US has hovered somewhere between five and six-and-a-half percent. Despite all the efforts of women’s aviation bodies including the Ninety-Nines (the Whirly Girls’ “older sister” organisation) to make headway in rectifying the imbalance, women today constitute just 7% of the world’s certified pilots for all types of aircraft (‘Female Helicopter Pilots on The Rise’, Claire McCann, Prestige Helicopters, Inc., Upd.11-Nov-2020, www.prestigehelicopters.com).

Women in Aviation International: best strategy, targeting girls at a young age to foster the ‘bug’ for a flying career

The reasons flying has continued to be a male stronghold are many and varied. With so few women pilots—only 13 credentialed to fly helicopters by 1955—young women and girls have been bereft of visible role models and mentors to show the way. At school-level not enough effort have been made to make teenage girls aware of the opportunities there are in a flying career. The preponderance of male pilots perpetuates the “highly masculine image of aviation“, reinforcing the stereotype that the profession is “not a woman’s job” (Why There Aren’t More Female Pilots’, Katherine LaGrave, IMdiversity 08-Mar-2018, www.imdiversity.com). This in part comes back to a prevailing mentality of “Top Gun” chauvinism. Female pilots have commented on aviation still being an “old boys’ club” and the lack of support, bias and intimidation they experienced from men in the industry during their training (‘Chances Are Your Pilot Isn’t a Woman. Here’s Why’, Kimberly Perkins, Seattle Business, (nd), www.seattlebusinessmag.com). The issue of unhelpful male pilots for some women has led to another road block, the paucity of female instructors in the industry. 

🔺 Ret.Col. Sally D Murphy, 1st female copter pilot in US Army

Once in the industry some women pilots have found themselves facing static career paths, the sheer lack of opportunities to attain seniority has eventually led a number of women in military and commercial aviation to prematurely leave the profession. Another criticism of the aviation industry is that it hasn’t embraced the change in work rules and conditions that other industries have…getting the work/life balance right is an issue of more importance to women who usually have to bear the brunt of child-rearing activities (‘Why are there so few women in aviation?’, Kathryn Creedy, CNN, 20-Nov-2019, www.cnn.com).

🔺 Cessna 172

Research suggests the prohibitive costs involved can be a barrier for women. Aircraft training in the US can cost up to US$150,000, add to this the soaring price of purchasing an entry-level commercial plane today…the (adjusted) price of buying a new Cessna 172 is four times greater than it was in 1960 (‘Why Are There So Few Female Pilots?, Rebecca Maksel, Air and Space, 06-Feb-2015, www.airspacemag.com). 

🔺 Malaysia’s 1st female copter pilot (Photo: The Star (Mal.)

What makes the persistence of multiple barriers and obstacles blocking women from realising their professional pilot dreams maddeningly vexatious is the dilemma now facing the industry as a whole, a looming worldwide shortage of qualified pilots to take the reins of the big airliners. Some airlines like United in the US recently have flagged the introduction of quotas to increase pilot numbers for women and for minorities, but much more fundamental structural change is required before we see real progress in tackling the gender imbalance. 

(Photo: PPRuNe Forums)

▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪

☸ having already been appointed a flugkapitän (flight captain), a position till then exclusively reserved for male German pilots 

❇ later Reitsch was also the first woman to fly a rocket plane

✴ numbers in the US did initially rise from the 1960s to the 1980s but have plateaued since that point (Maksel)

🈂 member #1 was appropriately enough Hanna Reitsch

Finland’s Magnetic Island: Jussarö, A Danger to Shipping

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Coastal geology & environment, Regional History, Travel

Its been called a ghost town but the island’s massive concentration of iron ore under the sea⧆ exerts a powerful magnetic pull on passing ships and boats. The island of Jussarö is one of some 40,000 (and counting) islands off the coast that form Finland’s vast archipelago⌖.

(Image: julkaisut.metsa.fi)
(Source: Abandoned Spaces)

The “ghost town” tag comes from the closure of the island’s iron ore mining works in 1967☯ due to a decline in the world price for the mineral (‘Jussarö’, www.en.jussaro.net) …leaving the landscape scattered with the remnants of old industrial buildings abandoned to nature.

⇑ Hanneke Wrome (Image: alchetron.com)

Compass interference, a danger to shipping
The dense concentration of iron ore deposits within the island has been known to make the navigation equipment of passing vessels in the Gulf of Finland go haywire. The magnetic force emitted by the island tends to make ships malfunction and their compasses point in the wrong direction. Historically, a consequence of this has been a large incidence of marine accidents and shipwrecks in the vicinity. In 1468 the Hanseatic League cargo ship ‘Hanneke Wrome’ (or ‘Vrome’) was caught in a storm and wrecked near Jussarö island with the loss of over 200 lives and a vast quantity of expensive fabric, barrels of honey, gold coins and jewellery (‘Finland’s abandoned iron ore mine’, Abandoned Spaces, Bojan Ivanov, www.abandonedspaces.com). Perhaps the most famous shipwreck, known as “Jussarö I”, is a early 16th century ship belonging to the fleet of Swedish king, Gustav I Vasa (‘Jussarö Island’, www.visitraseborg.com). Given this hazard, Jussarö has been a haven for pilot stations and lighthouses (the island’s earliest pilot station dated from early 19th century).

⇑ Sundharu lighthouse

Raseborg’s teeth “ship trap”
Several smaller islands and islets south of Jussarö collectively known as Raseborgs gaddama (Raseborg”s Teeth”) are particularly prone to shipwrecks. This area is known to have caused disturbances in navigation as early as the 17th century. In 1751 Swedish naval cartographer “Jonas Hahn was able to explain the phenomenon by the high iron content in the underwater rock formation in the area”. The Sundharu lighthouse was stationed on one of the skerries here to try to counter the danger (‘Finnish cases: Four case study areas. Case 1 – Jussarö ship trap’, www submariner-net.eu).

When the mining activity ended, Jussarö was taken over by the Finnish Defence Forces and used for military training and urban war simulation. After the army left in 2005 the island came under the administration of Metsähallitus, a state-owned authority in charge of national parks, wildlife and forestry. The main activity today is tourism with day-trippers regularly commuting from the mainland.

Postscript: The island’s 13th century footnote in history
Jussarö first gets a mention in medieval Danish documents, appearing in King Valdemar II’s Survey (or “Court Rolls”), a document compared to William the Conqueror’s Doomsday Book record. The ‘Survey’ of Valdemar II of Denmark (reigned 1202–1241) was a land register of Danish settlements and their populations, c. 1231 (Nils Hybel, The Nature of Kingship c.800–c.1300: The Danish Incident , (2017)). Jussarö is included in the royal survey apparently because it was on the Danish route map (www.en.jussaro.net).

(Source: nationalparks.fi)

𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨
⧆ the largest deposits of iron ore in Finland
⌖ Jussarö itself lies within the Ekenäs Archipelago
☯ the second time iron ore mining operations had been abandoned on Jussarö, previous it was mined, sometimes using Russian prisoners, from the 1830s to 1861

Flying’s Future Shock: Anticipating the Great Reset

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Public health,, Travel

All the travel and aviation pundits say commercial flying—when it does finally get airborne again—will never be the same again. There are so many imponderables and unknowns  about the enigmatic future of airline travel, the cup of endless speculation nonetheless runneth over.

No one, inside the industry or out, knows when international flights will resume normal services. Like everything else it hinges on containing, and ultimately on subduing the pandemic (the “holy grail” of the vaccine?). When it does happen and things return to ‘normal’, we know it will be a ‘new’ normal…so let’s concern ourselves now with what it might look like?

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What’s on the cards at airports in the future?
Airports will need to design or augment existing health and safety measures to stack up to the new requirements. Airlines will be trying to minimise the risk of human-to-human contagion, which’ll  probably mean touchless check-ins and more utilisation of self-service E-ticketing machines, thermal scanning of body temperature, increasing use of biometrics. The imperative of social distancing will still be with us, airports will have to adhere to the safety edicts of keeping everyone 1.5m apart from everyone else. But will this be feasible, or even partly attainable? Airports are people magnets, people come en masse – to fly, to work, to farewell other people and to welcome others on return.

A pessimistic prognosis with very little “blue sky”
Will we end up seeing airports despairingly throwing their hands up in the air and saying it’s all too much? If the prescribed public health measures include things like wiping down the handles of every piece of baggage and all the trays as they go through the scanner, that will add intolerable delays to an already tortuously long process for people at peak-travel times (‘Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad, for a Very Long Time’, (James Fallows), The Atlantic, 11-May-2020, www.theatlantic.com). The CEO of one of the world’s busiest airports, London’s Heathrow, is on record as stating that social distancing will be impossible to maintain✱ (‘COVID-19 and travel: Heathrow boss says social distancing “impossible” in airports’, (Neil Callanan), Traveller, 04-May-2020, www.traveller.com.au).

Will passengers turn up at the luggage check-in fully decked out in hazmat suits, smelling like they’ve been dipped by their heels in a vat of disinfectant? Will face masks, already in common use, gloves and even face shields, be mandatory for everyone in airports? Attaining standardised practice in these and other aspects of the changing landscape of flying, is a long way off happening.

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(Source: www.theweek.in)

A Covid-19 health pass?
Strict health screening for incoming passengers at international borders in the coronavirus age is a given, but future travellers may need to present new documents along with their international passport. Flyers may need some kind of “proof of good health” to travel internationally – much like the certificate you need now to show you’ve had the required inoculations to enter certain regions prone to yellow fever, malaria, etc. Alternately, these “immunity passports” may be used to record negative coronavirus test results❅  (‘Face masks, blood tests and onboard janitors. Flying’s about to feel very different’, (Karen Gilchrist), CNBC Traveler, 17-May-2020, www.cnbc.com; ‘The era of peak travel is over’, (Sarah Khan), Vox, 22-Apr-2020, www.vox.com). 

Social distancing on planes, an oxymoron?
If we turn to the aircraft flights themselves, how will they work? Some of the world’s international carriers are considering removing the middle seat in jets (as a temporary move only) to enhance space between passengers⊞. Ryanair is the first carrier to outlaw toilet queues, passengers are now required to raise their hand to request a toilet visit.

Transforming seats into anti-virus shelters
Airplane designers are exploring the possibilities of converting the present flying “sardine tins” into spaces that observe social distancing. ‘Janus’ seats are one option advocated by the Italian company Aviointeriors…a double-S shaped configuration which juxtaposes passenger seats in an opposing direction to each other. Passengers are also separated by a high transparent thermoplastic shield or screen. The company had an alternate design which retains the standard seating configuration but attaches a separating perspex screen to each seat (‘Aviointeriors proposes post-COVID-19 Janus seats’, (John Walton), Runway Girl Network, April 2020, www.runwaygirlnetwork.com). The designs are still in testing stage but one drawback is that glass dividers adds another hard surface to passenger space which may be infected by contaminated droplets. the view of Peter Harbison, CAPA Centre for Aviation chairman emeritus, is that the removal of middle seats won’t be sufficient to ensure the social distancing requirement on airplanes, that the outcome is not realistically attainable.

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(Image: Aviointeriors S.p.A.)

Hermetically-sealed flying?
Clearly, the level of on-board hygiene will need to ramped up post-corona. There’s talk about having cleaners on-board during flights, to target the plane’s tactile zones such as toilet doors. One objective airlines will definitely aim for is minimalism, they’ll want to radically pare back the on-board fringe items. Touchscreen entertainment might disappear, pre-packaged meals left on seats prior to boarding to avoid contact, the end of free drinks, etc (Gilchrist). 

The financial side
With all the uncertainty of what’s in store for future travel, one thing that will definitely  change is the economics of travel. From the consumer side, if airlines resort to removing seats, therefore capping the passenger load of a jet, it’s hard to imagine how that will not result in a ticket price hike. IATA has estimated that with aircrafts only two-thirds full, average fares would jump up to between 43 and 54 per cent✪. Airlines have reckoned that they need to fill 77 per cent capacity of the aircraft just to break even (Gilchrist). Travel industry pundits have indicated that most leisure travellers won’t be willing to pay more if the option of affordable travel is taken away (‘Social distancing on planes during coronavirus: Middle seat won’t stay empty for long’, (Dawn Gilbertson), Traveller, 04-May-2020, www.traveller.com.au).

Some industry insiders have predicted the end of over-tourism, reasoning that for financial reasons or because of the new layers of bureaucracy required, travellers will be less inclined to travel as frequently as before the crisis, and with it will we see the demise of the jet-setting lifestyle and the addictive travel pilgrim. It may be too premature to make such a dramatic call, the 9/11 terrorist attacks put many people off international flying, but not permanently, the industry bounced back its pre-2001 level eventually, and this is an industry that employs over 10 per cent of the global workforce (Khan).

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Certainly though, for the foreseeable future, tourists will probably think twice about venturing to the world’s most heavily populated destinations (Venice, Rome, Paris, New York, London, Dubrovnik, the Pyramids of Giza, the Acropolis, the Great Wall, etc.). A whole new generation of ‘agoraphobes’ may decide to avoid travelling during the peak season and seek out the less-travelled, remoter locations to holiday.

A respite from the ecological ‘footprint’ for Venezia and Plaza San Marco  
(Source: www.sites.middlebury.edu)

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Business travel to recede?
Another matter to ponder is whether business travel will be reduced when the Covid-19 dust settles, will professionals and business folk still travel O/S to exotic locations for conferences? The lockdowns and restrictions of the last few months meant that the overwhelming majority of conferences went virtual. Administrators are no doubt discovering that they can just as meaningfully conduct business meetings by Skype or by video-conferencing, without the need for everyone to be in the same room together. If so, this may well have a negative knock-on affect for economy class tickets (which are subsidised by business and first class) (‘How Much of Airlines’ Revenue Comes From Business Travelers?’, www.investopedia.com).

╳                                                                              ╳
✱ we have recently witnessed that once beaches have been reopened to the public, it is virtually impossible to police distance restrictions on packed beachfronts
❅ Emirates have taken a different tact, trialling a rapid “10-minute” blood test at the departures gate (insiders have questioned whether this would be feasible to implement at high-volume times (Gilchrist)
⊞ operators already indicating they will move to vacant middle seats include Southwestern, Delta, American and Qantas – the Australian carrier later reneged on this claiming the risk of Covid infection on an aircraft was minimal (‘Qantas passengers angered after airline reintroduces the middle seat’, 20-May-2020, www.news.com.au/)
✪ that said, some airlines may, for the immediate period, offer travellers discounted fares and deals to reignite interest in overseas travel … “struggling operators (will) incentivize flyers to return to the skies” (Gilchrist)