Airline Crew Parties On Sydney Layover, Gets Fined

@2PAXfly your correction duly noted. clearly i thought the united crew was the culprit when I posted but soon after saw the smh article. oops...

Good they should be fined even more and potentially face jail time.

Airline crews pose a bit of a problem that hadn't come under the microscope here until now. There is a bit of a juggling act that has to happen. Sydney airport has a curfew for flights, so that limits arrival and departure times. And a lot of international flights from there take more than 8 hours. So , there needs to be a layover for lots of crews. Some flights are using crew from places where the numbers of covid19 infections are low. Singapore airlines for example. Some airlines are coming from home ports where infection rates are high. Up till now, each airline made its own arrangements and contracts with a variety of hotels at a price they negotiated. From today onwards, airlines will need to pay a government set layover fee for staying in a supervised hotle. That might ruffle feathers in the airline bean counting department. The next muddle to sort out is how to keep these crews apart but all in supervised layover hotels. It appears 2 hotels will be used , but that will probably be modified as time goes on. It used to be that people from overseas thought of Australians as "easy going" , "laconic" "happy go lucky". My Swiss friend assured us, when he did some housesitting for us, that we have far more rules than Switzerland. It is what it is. Those readers with a young relative who excells in bureaucracy, could do well in mentioning Australia as a career path. And thus, as a nation,instead of travelling, we Australians have kept ourselves largely entertained making rules for one another, during what has been quite a queer year. On a different travel related website there was a similar editorial article about the United flight attendant , huffing and puffing that surely airlines would avoid coming to Australia if the flight attendants were put in secure hotels. That may well be so, but with our pleasant national hobby of day to day rule making, we might not notice for quite some time. It does occur to me though, many articles in "travel" websites are now no longer about travel experiences as such. But instead telling us how one nation is faring compared to another as if this were a virus olympics. For a while Sweden was championed by a number of rather pushy individuals telling us that their death rate should be viewed in such and such a way, along with a team promoting Germany and its "scientific " approach. We heard of "travel bubbles", "travel corridors" and all sorts of whatnot. It would be nice though to hear some stories from the other places which also use the closed border system... New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand,Vietnam, the island nations in the South Pacific, the Maritime Provinces in Canada. It would be a pity if Australia was being singled out by the travel websites , wouldn't it? Then again, stories about Australia do seem to get quite a few replies and "clicks". I suppose that keeps a travel website financial..... But wouldn't it be nice just once in a while to have a travel story?

@Mark Thank you I think, but it still begs the question of why we are willing to accept this questionable solution to an untenable position.

Dang Rufus. Misapplying the words of quarantine and inoculation advocate Benjamin Franklin to your irrelevant askhole question is next-level whataboutery. Props.