Virgin Atlantic has announced it plans to restart long-haul passenger flights next month.
The airline hopes to resume its flying programme on July 20, despite the UK Government introducing a 14-day quarantine policy on all passengers entering the UK from June 8. It will be reviewed every three weeks.
It announced it will steadily increase the number of routes it offers to passengers as travel restrictions are lifted.
The airline said in a statement: “Virgin Atlantic has announced its plan to restart passenger flying, with services from London Heathrow to Orlando, Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York JFK and Los Angeles set to resume from July 20 and 21 2020.
“As countries around the world start to relax travel restrictions, Virgin Atlantic will resume some routes on July 20 while steadily increasing passenger flying throughout the second half of 2020, with a further, gradual recovery through 2021 in line with customer demand.”
Meanwhile, a Government expert has questioned the need for the quarantine.
Professor Robert Dingwall, a scientific adviser to the Government and member of a sub-group of Sage (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies), said there was no evidence of new clusters of Covid-19 infection involving people who have been travelling abroad.
He said: “I think we would really need to get the level in this country significantly further down before quarantine started to become a useful measure.
“That I think, even then, we would have to see something that is targeted on countries with a significantly higher level of community transmission than ourselves – and there aren’t too many of those around, I’m afraid.”
