• Air de-escalation - EU recommendations for flights and airports

"I got on the plane like it was my house, and I got off the plane like it was my house . " Inmaculada Sierra talks to EL MUNDO to describe her particular adventure: a vacation trip to Menorca. She arrived last Saturday at the airport equipped with a mask, ID and boarding pass, but once there she did not need more. The procedure, except for the distance in the queues for boarding, remains similar: "No one controlled the temperature, and the plane was complete; all filling the rows with three."

Once in Balearic territory, he visited the pearl of Menorca at his whim: bars, beaches, tourism . Four days moving "everywhere"; four days of idyll that, however, ended this Wednesday with a call from Insular Health. The reason: all the passengers in the row before hers, on flight VY1340 Alicante-Menorca, had tested positive for coronavirus .

Now Immaculate is waiting confined to her hotel waiting for the PCR results to emerge to know if she is infected, but the taste in her mouth is bitter: "Why the hell did I take that plane?" . She blames herself, and the sensation she has left takes the form of Hydra with several heads: of complete uncertainty, "I don't know if I will be able to return or not," and of concern: "We were all huddled on the plane, without any control. "

Security measures

Inmaculada's complaint joins many others where the general complaint has to do with the distance between seats in the plane itself, although the truth is that there are security measures. They were issued as recommendations by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in May, and in Spanish territory they are mandatory from this very Tuesday with Royal Decree-Law 26 / 2020.

Some of these guidelines that are now becoming mandatory have to do, for example, with the use of masks (a new one every four hours for over six years), equipment conditioning (to incorporate protective screens on counters) or cleaning from airports and planes. But the most controversial has to do with the safety distancing inside the plane.

The norm says that "the 1.5 meter spacing is maintained as long as this is operationally feasible." As you can read, the edict states that if the configuration of the cabin allows it, "operators must guarantee, as far as possible, the physical distance between passengers", although it culminates by giving companies the power to fill or not the planes .

"If physical distance due to passenger load cannot be guaranteed," the aircraft must at least at all times comply with the other "preventive measures." The drafting of the rule itself establishes a situation that benefits companies, since they can occupy the aircraft if demand allows it, and that it has become mandatory, it does not change or modify the distance between passengers.

EL MUNDO has tried to contact Vueling, the airline with which the complainant traveled, to find out their particular protocols against the coronavirus. As of Friday, July 10, there has been no response yet.

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