Should I pick up my family returning from Thailand amid the coronavirus outbreak?

Simon Calder answers questions on the virus, plane safety during Storm Ciara and record-breaking flights

Passengers wear protective masks as they walk through Suvarnabhumi airport, Bangkok (EPA)

Q I am picking up two family members from Heathrow airport who are returning from Thailand. Should I have any concerns regarding the coronavirus? I have two eightysomething parents to consider at home too. Could I please ask what you would do? I have the option to ask them to take a taxi. But that would just seem unkind and perhaps unnecessary if I could bump into someone off a Bangkok flight in Tesco the next day.

Name supplied

A There is certainly a risk in the course of action you propose but perhaps not of the kind you envisage. Sadly, on the average day in the UK, five people die in road accidents, and a further 70 are seriously injured. Given that Heathrow has decent public transport to many destinations, I urge you to consider asking your family members to take a rail alternative to eliminate this risk.

To address your concerns about the new coronavirus: you should ask the family members if they have spent a prolonged spell (15 minutes or more) within one metre of any of the 32 people in Thailand who have been diagnosed with Wuhan coronavirus so far. If they have, they should not travel from Bangkok and should self-isolate. But I imagine that, in fact, they have simply been on holiday or a work trip. If this is the case, then there is no significant risk that I can see.

While I sympathise with all the people who are directly affected by the new virus, I believe that the risks are being magnified out of all proportion. In the unlikely event that there is someone in your local Tesco with the virus (or any of the much more common winter viruses) who is contagious, they will look ill. I suggest that you keep a couple of metres away from them. Which I suspect you would do anyway, without advice from me.

Would fewer winter flights help airports to cope? (Getty)

Q Witnessing the flight disruptions as a result of Storm Ciara, I recall one of the airline bosses calling for fewer flights to be scheduled in the winter so that there’s more slack in the system. Is that a workable idea?

James B

A It has been a miserable weekend for tens of thousands of airline passengers. Hundreds of flights to and from Heathrow airport have been cancelled, and dozens diverted far and wide. One Latam flight from Sao Paulo to Heathrow ended up in Barcelona, after two “go-arounds” (attempts at landing). And Emirates diverted a pair of Airbus A380 “superjumbo” flights inbound from Dubai. The one going to Manchester turned back to Frankfurt, while the other to Gatwick is on the ground in Zurich.

Heathrow and Gatwick are, respectively, the busiest two-runway and single-runway airports in the world. Manchester is the third-busiest airport in Europe. Yet given the conditions – including crosswinds gusting dangerously – I’m not sure that having fewer flights scheduled would help. Heathrow already has a system whereby flights are filleted in advance of forecast bad weather; on Saturday afternoon the airlines collectively cancelled about 200 Sunday flights, representing about one-sixth of planned movements.

The idea is that pre-emptive cancellations gives passengers certainty and allows airlines to operate other flights to schedule. That, at least, is the plan, but the severe conditions meant that hundreds more flights were cancelled on the day. The same kind of disruption happens from time to time at airports far better provided with runways, such as Paris CDG, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

The person you recall was actually an airport boss: Stewart Wingate, chief executive of Gatwick. After the schedules at Heathrow unravelled particularly badly a decade ago, he said that some flights should be transferred to his airport for the winter – when Gatwick has spare capacity. But at the time I took it as a sly dig against the larger rival, rather than a serious proposition, and I can’t see it happening any time soon.

Was the record-breaking transatlantic flight safe? (British Airways)

Q I read about the British Airways Boeing 747 that flew from New York to London at record speed over the weekend. You wrote that it averaged 700mph from end to end. Is the plane actually designed to handle that?

Jeff B

A You are not the only person to express concern about the performance of British Airways flight 112 on Saturday night from JFK to Heathrow, which covered the ground in just 4 hours 56 minutes – arriving 102 minutes ahead of schedule.

Other aircraft were almost as quick: close behind, in both time and space, was Virgin Atlantic VS4 on the same route, which landed 93 minutes early. They led a long procession of unexpected pre-6am arrivals included BA from Boston, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Toronto and Washington DC, Virgin Atlantic from Miami, Air Canada from Toronto and United from Chicago. Annoying for local residents around Heathrow, good for passengers and the environment.

“The jet stream has been glowing hard all week,” wrote one contributor to a pilots’ forum – referring to the channel of strong wind blowing from west to east across the Atlantic.

Let me put your mind at rest about the safety aspects. For passengers the important thing is the position of the aircraft relative to the ground: you want to get from east of New York City to west of London. But for the pilots, what counts is the speed relatively to the airflow. And if a 200mph conveyor belt of breeze is going in your direction, it is well worth exploiting. The aircraft is perfectly able to average 500mph relative to the air, and that was what was happening.

I was on a transatlantic flight a couple of days earlier (Virgin Atlantic from Miami to Heathrow); it was a bit bumpy getting into the jet stream, but after that the journey just flew by. Needless to say, the captain and first officer were meticulous professionals who ensured the flight’s safety.

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