Cathay crew to work 21-day stints to avoid quarantine

The carrier said the requirement for crew to quarantine could add as much as $52m to its monthly cash burn

Cathay flew just 30,410 passengers last month, an average of 981 a day. Bloomberg

Cathay Pacific is taking extreme measures to cope with new rules that will require flight crew to quarantine in Hong Kong from Saturday, introducing a rotation policy that puts staff out of action for almost one month at a time after they have completed 21-day shifts.

Crew who volunteer to take part in the airline’s so-called closed loop plan must isolate at Cathay’s Headland Hotel whenever they return to Hong Kong during their 21-day duty cycle.

Once the three-week shift is over, they will need to self-isolate for 14 days in a hotel in Taikoo Shing on Hong Kong Island. Then they will get 14 days time off, bringing the full duty cycle to 49 days.

Cathay has said the requirement for crew to quarantine could add as much as HK$400 million ($52m) to its monthly cash burn, which is already as high as HK$1.5 billion due to an unprecedented slump in demand for air travel.

The new measures, which come after Hong Kong extended the mandatory quarantine period for people arriving in the city, are aimed at shoring up the border, even as new daily coronavirus cases ease to low double digits and authorities relax some social-distancing rules.

“As long as stringent quarantine measures continue to be in place in Hong Kong and elsewhere, the coming months will be extremely challenging,” Cathay’s chief customer and commercial officer Ronald Lam said in a statement.

Cathay flew just 30,410 passengers last month, an average of 981 a day. Passenger load factor was 13.3 per cent, a record low. The airline is particularly exposed to the pandemic as it has no home market to serve while international routes are largely off-limits.

Cathay’s shares have dropped 23 per cent over the past 12 months.

Under the new shift cycle, crew will need to take Covid-19 tests every time they arrive in Hong Kong, and they may be subjected to more when arriving in countries such as Australia, which also has strict border measures in place, a Cathay spokesperson wrote in an email to Bloomberg.

Enough staff have volunteered to take part in the programme, the spokesperson said, without disclosing numbers. They will undergo medical surveillance for seven days after the 14-day hotel quarantine period.

Pilots who don’t volunteer for the closed loop plan will likely mostly operate turnaround cargo flights within single flight duty periods.