Frankfurt (AFP)

Crews who learn their destination only 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.

And it may even take several years for the system to return to normal.

"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 going back to the 1950s, that is 3,000 daily passengers instead of 350,000.

- Blind start -

Problem: "demand is currently much less predictable than usual," said a spokesman for the company of Abu Dhabi Etihad.

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 Lufthansa CFO Thorsten Dirks.

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

Some flights, like the airline's first scheduled for India, were canceled the previous day 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" (literally "deep storage"). "The procedure to reactivate them is cumbersome, sometimes up to four weeks," said the spokeswoman.

In addition, staff must be up to date in training. At Transair in Senegal, pilots fly without passengers to keep the licenses.

Etihad, which took advantage of the downtime for maintenance while 80% of the fleet was on the ground in April, organizes "every 45 days" simulator training for pilots.

- Return to normal in 4 years -

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 capacity.

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

The CEO of the largest airline in the Middle East Emirates expects a return to normal takes up to four years.

Lufthansa plans to serve 90% of short-haul destinations and 70% long-haul by September again. However, the supply will then only be 40% of normal in total.

With flight cancellations communicated to passengers a few weeks in advance, telephone customer service 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," he concludes.

© 2020 AFP