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Wales Online
Wales Online
National
Cathy Owen

The stark difference in our skies as flight tracker images show how they've emptied

Look up to the skies over Wales and there are very few flights as the coronavirus lockdown continues.

In fact at many points during Friday morning there were no flights at all over the country featured on flightradar24, an online tracker that monitors aviation traffic across the world. With flights around the world grounded recent images have been a stark difference to what it would normally be like.

This is what it was like over Wales on Friday morning:

No flights over Wales on Friday morning (Flightradar24)

This is more like the normal picture, taken from March 2:

(flightradar24)

This is compared to flight traffic over Wales and England on the afternoon of Friday, April 3:

(flightradar24)

Worldwide airlines have been slashing flights because of the pandemic and on Friday Heathrow announced it will close one of its runways from next week as air traffic continues to plummet.  

This week EasyJet announced it was grounding all flights and British Airways has suspended 36,000 staff.

And financial support has been announced to help Cardiff Airport with the downturn.

The Welsh Government will provide finance through varying its existing agreed commercial loan facility to support its reduced operations and to maintain solvency.

Global travel restrictions mean there are currently no commercial flights operating for passenger travel from Cardiff Airport and operational hours of the airfield have been reduced.

Departure board at Cardiff Airport (Cardiff Airport)

But the airport remains open to provide freight, emergency, and critical logistical support.

Just over half the jobs at the airport will be furloughed for a minimum of three weeks to be reinstated when business needs change.

Welsh economy minister Ken Skates said: "Cardiff Airport is an important part of our economy and our transport network and this proactive step will help to protect the airport.

"We will release the minimum amounts of the existing loan arrangement necessary to keep the airport operating and will ensure it can continue to support the wider response to the outbreak.

"This includes being available for key medical flights and serving the needs of the military and emergency services."

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