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Until this weekend, a Qantas passenger who fell asleep on the 800-mile flight from Darwin to Alice Springs could have been forgiven for thinking the plane had been diverted to land in Hong Kong.
The city in Australia's Red Centre is home to Asia Pacific Aircraft Storage. For much of the past four years, the dry heat of the outback has ensconced much of the fleet of Cathay Pacific, perhaps the airline hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. With its only base in China, the edge of the country that experienced the toughest travel restrictions, CX's schedule appeared to be slim and minimal.
The first Cathay Pacific plane to take refuge in the desert was an Airbus A330 that landed in July 2020. At its peak, Alice Springs was home to 76 wide-body jets painted with Hong Kong's Intercontinental Airlines livery. That first plane was the last to depart more than 200 weeks later.
With all Cathay Pacific aircraft flying north and continuing the critical business of flying safely around the world, I am calling this the end of the COVID era (no matter what North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un says), it is a good time to reflect on what we have learned.
The lesson is simple: When the next pandemic hits, politicians should be removed from the travel restriction process. Looking back, we shudder at the deep-rooted and long-standing incompetence of our elected representatives.
Monday 10 June marked four years since then Home Secretary Priti Patel announced a two-week mandatory quarantine for almost all arrivals from overseas. “Now that we have passed the peak of the virus, we must take steps to prevent imported cases causing a resurgence of this deadly disease,” she said.
Five days later, the first phase of lockdown ended and easyJet resumed operations. Tina Milton, one of the cabin crew on the airline's first departure, Flight 883, from Gatwick to Glasgow, told me: “This is the start of the future.”
A month later, “travel corridors” were opened for British travellers, allowing quarantine-free travel to France, Italy, Spain and Turkey, but not Portugal or Croatia.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps hosted what has become the customary travel bingo game after the government announced hours earlier that “from midnight tonight anyone returning to the UK from Spain will be required to self-isolate for two weeks.”
That's right: just 15 days later, the most popular destination for British tourists has been put back on the quarantine list.
By August 15, 2020, anyone brave enough to visit France, the second most popular country, would have to lock themselves in their rooms for two weeks on their return. The Netherlands was also on the “red list” and this is when we saw the first instances of transport operators speeding up to get people home before the 4am deadline: Stena Line drove at full speed from the Hook of Holland to Harwich so passengers would not have to isolate.
By September, the situation had become exotic, with mandatory quarantine from seven Greek islands: Crete, Lesbos, Mykonos, Santorini, Serifos, Tinos and Zakynthos.
In bronze position on the podium of the craziest pandemic decisions sits the moment the Foreign Office put Portugal in the same risk category as central Kabul and parts of Somalia.
But the government was preparing to unleash the nuclear weapon of a total ban on international leisure travel. Some who were absent from the “Jingle & Mingle” party held at the Conservative Party's election headquarters on 14 December 2020 were busily drafting legislation to impose fines on anyone who was at airports, seaports or international railway stations without a valid reason.
Three weeks into the 10-week ban, Ms Patel complained that there were “still too many people coming in and out of our country every day”. Hotel quarantine began the following week, costing around £2,000 for 10 days.
A subsequent report revealed that the entire hotel quarantine process was pointless, so it received a silver medal for worst ministerial decision. “Every new restriction on freedom, such as the ill-advised 'travel declaration', weakens us and our standing in the world,” I wrote.
The gold award goes to “Amber Plus”, a category created especially for France in July 2021. Travel bans were imposed in England and Wales at the start of the summer holidays due to what Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called “the so-called beta variant, particularly on the French island of Reunion”. Being 5,800 miles away from Paris was deemed irrelevant, and indeed the island itself was spared the “Amber Plus” stigma.
At the time, France's European Minister Clement Beaune tweeted that “the UK quarantine measures against France are excessive and incomprehensible from a health perspective.”
But France got revenge. Proving that the UK government did not have a monopoly on pointless Covid measures, France imposed a travel ban on British passengers for three weeks between Christmas 2021 and the start of 2022, ruining holidays and family reunions for hundreds of thousands of people.
The fact that the UK travel industry has withstood such an onslaught of irrationality, despite many decisions now being made by festive politicians, is a tribute to the resilience of the men and women who work there. We can fly again. I hope that one day I can visit Australia's great Red Centre and find that no long-haul planes are parked when I land in Alice Springs.
Simon Calder, also known as “the self-funded travel man”, has been writing about travel for The Independent since 1994. In his weekly column he explores the big travel issues and what it means for you.
