Frankfurt (AFP)

Crews who only learn their destination a few hours before taking off, pilots kept level by flights without passengers or simulators: the recovery of airlines after the peak of the coronavirus is in difficulty.

"There are almost no more fixed schedules but only on-call" for the staff, recently explained the boss of the first European airline group Lufthansa, Carsten Spohr.

"They know when to be at the airport and are informed of the destination a few hours in advance" only, he added. The methods used so far to respond to exceptional cases "have become the norm," said Spohr.

The challenge of restarting for this sector is immense. For more than two months, it practically stopped with, in the case of Lufthansa, a flight offer comparable to that of the 1950s, that is 3,000 daily passengers instead of 350,000.

- Blind start -

Problem: the air transport sector no longer has any visibility on demand or on the routes that it will be possible to reopen in the short term.

Suddenly artificial intelligence, widely used before the crisis for planning, is put away in the closet: "the data collected for decades are unusable, at least in the near future" and "we have to relearn everything" to the algorithm, says CFO Thorsten Dirks.

And in the meantime human intelligence is "faster and more flexible," he adds.

Some flights, like the first scheduled for India, are canceled the day before for the next day due to a lack of landing authorization.

For others, on the contrary, the demand turns out to be too great at the last moment. During the Pentecost weekend, the Lufthansa boss had made reservations to leave with his family for a long Pentecost weekend, only to end up on a waiting list of 70 people.

It was necessary "suddenly to add a second plane in parallel", explains Mr. Spohr.

At the height of the crisis, 700 of the 763 Lufthansa planes were nailed to the ground, parked by the dozen on the tarmac at Frankfurt Airport and even an airstrip.

"It is possible to reactivate in one to two days" those put in the hangar for less than three months, explains Lara Matuschek, spokesperson for the group, to AFP.

But beyond that, the machines are in "deep storage". "The procedure to reactivate them is cumbersome, sometimes up to four weeks," said the spokeswoman.

Beyond being available, the staff must also be up to date in training, and for some pilots, as at Transair in Senegal, this means flying without passengers to keep the licenses. Others rely on simulators.

- 'Not sustainable' -

In the rest of the world, the recovery is slow: Singapore Airlines, where reactivation lasts "between a few days and a week depending on the type of aircraft", will offer 12 additional destinations from June and July. But, with 32 destinations against 135 normally, the Asian group only operates at 6% of its pre-Covid-19 capacities.

In Japan, a "gradual" restart also for JAL and ANA, which offers 30% of its flights in June against only 15% in May.

Lufthansa plans to serve 90% of short-haul destinations and 70% long-haul by September again. But despite a multiplication of connections, the offer will then be only 40% of normal in total.

"Our goal was above all to reconnect the German and European cities to our hubs", including the first German hub Frankfurt, and "to serve again very tourist destinations", details Ms. Matuschek.

With flight cancellations communicated to passengers a few weeks in advance, the telephone customer service to cancel or modify tickets is overloaded. Currently, the group spends several hundred million euros in reimbursements per month, according to Mr. Spohr.

System D is working at the moment. "But when you're trying to run a business like ours, to make money, it's not a sustainable method," she concludes.

© 2020 AFP