Thread on why Australia really needs international aviation even during the pandemic, why international airlines don't like Victoria's quarantine restrictions, and why that's a problem for us without many good solutions other than to keep on doing what we're doing. (1/15)

At the moment, Australian-based airlines are barely operating international flights at all. Qantas is doing a few repatriation flights a month from covid/expat hotspots to quarantine in the Northern Territory, Virgin haven't done any since they went bust. (2/15)

So we're relying on international airlines to fly to Australia, both to get returning travellers home and - more importantly for most of us - cos about a third of our imports are air freight, most of which usually travels in the bellies of passenger planes. (3/15)

International conventions exempt international air crew from most migration requirements, because people worked out long ago that aviation would be unworkable if you didn't do that. These are sometimes suspended for dire emergencies. (4/15)

Covid is a pretty dire emergency, all things considered, so we agreed early in the pandemic that international air crew in Australia would have to self-isolate, airlines would organise hotel transport, and they'd minimise community interaction. (5/15)

This worked. We still don't have any documented community transmission in NSW from international air crew. But as Australia's position on covid got harder and more "zero is the only acceptable outcome"-y, people have become more uncomfortable with any risk at all. (6/15)

There have been a few cases in NSW of Flight Crew Behaving Badly, none of which have led to transmission, and two recent cases of Flight Crew Behaving Sensibly that have led to single cases in associated workers with no onward spread (Ibis cleaner and airport bus driver) (7/15)

Because of the fear around all this, part of Victoria's restarting of international aviation after its little hiccup earlier in the year has been mandatory hotel isolation and covid testing for international air crew. Contacts of positive cases are detained for 14 days. (8/15)

The aviation industry hates this, and is considering pulling flights out of Victoria. They are right to hate it: it means that if there's an asymptomatic positive crew case on (eg) a LAX-MEL flight, then the whole crew from the flight are stuck in Melbourne for two weeks. (9/15)

And for every day that the airline can't get a replacement crew out to Melbourne - which can be several days in pandemic times, especially for smaller freight airlines - it also means that the plane is stuck on the tarmac at Tulla instead of earning money. (10/15)

So this is a problem. There's no requirement for foreign airlines to operate to Australia, and if everywhere (read: NSW) were tp Victorian-style rules on mandatory detention then they probably won't, and we don't have anything in place to replace that. (11/15)

What's the solution? Well, two options: one is that the federal govt imposes these rules nationwide and gives Qantas hundreds of millions of dollars (*) to set up an emergency freight and quarantine network, with its large furloughed crew base allowing loads of isolation (12/15)

The other is that nothing like that happens and NSW is stuck carrying the can for the rest of the country, more or less holding things together via brilliant public health responses, and being blamed for it, as it has been all year (13/15)

The Qantas point might have been a reasonable call earlier in the year, but the federal government are a useless bunch of dickheads, so of course they didn't do anything. Setting it all up in the epidemic's dying days as mass vaccination begins seems a bit OTT even so (14/15)

So realistically, the most likely outcome here is that NSW continues (with tighter restrictions on mixing crew with community, but crucially without the mandatory detention bit) as it's been, and we continue to be fine, but BLOODY HELL ROLL OUT THE VACCINE ALREADY (15/15)

* or the government could nationalise Qantas, or make it do the flights in exchange for shares, or whatever - that's a very second order question to the point of "providing lots of upfront money to subsidise a market-uncompetitive but covid-safer air service"