social distancing on board NZ flights
 

Coverage of PM Ardern's recent address to the nation noted that NZ will begin booking open seats between all passengers to facilitate social distancing.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...limit-covid-19

Does anyone have more information regarding this initiative? It's the first that I have seen of such a change, but I expect that it will become commonplace on many carriers soon.

Cam Wallace is mentioning that on twitter now. Is their task for the afternoon to figure out what it looks like and how to update seat maps etc.

My flight back from AKL on Wednesday night had 1 ABC empty. I was in 2A. Separation from crew while they were seated.

Works delux for everyone then...

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...bde6f8b858.png

looks like the middle seat are blocked off, with couple of rows in the middle of an a320 blocked off two to create zones.

Also on the ATR looks like you can only select the window seat, now making the ATR an 32 seater!

All I can say is Bravo! Kiwis are among the most sensible people on earth, in my experience. Like Canadians, but less constrained by their immediate neighbour than we are. I certainly hope that Air Canada and Westjet will follow NZ's lead. I'd also like to see this done in the USA, but I fear that it would have to be written into the bailout package, as greed is too great otherwise.

Same on the regional aircraft .....
https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...fcefab33de.jpg

I assume this is to get the number of seat available to 100 or less given that a domestic A320 has 171 seats (https://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/seat...rbus-a320-171d) and this takes out about 1/3 of the seats.

NZ382 tomorrow does not have this distancing, not sure why. There's actually no seats available directly between CHC -> AKL tomorrow (only via. WLG). NZ8743 tomorrow also doesn't have any distancing going on.

Looks like goes into effect from sometime next week?

Interesting as I just flew AKL-CHC this week (in 4A) with 4B and 4C also occupied, but 3A, 3B and 3C in front of us all empty!

The ban on indoor gatherings of 100 or more doesn't apply to public transport. This is a social distancing measure.

(https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/...Rb7L8CLw2fBZ1g)

Interesting bit in SCMP - March 22 2020

QUOTE:

"While AirNZ was coy about how its social distancing would work, it appeared every passenger would get a window seat and all other seats to either side of the aisle would be blocked for sale.

Cam Wallace, AirNZ’s chief revenue officer, shed more light on the plans in a tweet: “The team are working on amending seat maps and implementing restrictions on sales for flights to allow distancing. This will remove significant seat capacity, especially on regional services.”

“Air New Zealand is adapting its processes and systems to manage seating on board the aircraft to allow for customers to be spaced out where appropriate,” a company spokeswoman said. The airline said it would also take steps to prevent airfares from being artificially hiked by algorithms thinking flights were busy."


Article link

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/...g-takes-flight

I will be getting on an Air NZ domestic flight in an hour (CHC->AKL). According to the seat map when I checked in they are blocking out middles seats and most rows in the middle of the plane. Will let you know when I land if it works out that way.

Update: It looks like they start the seat map as described above, but started filling middle seats and middle rows after everything else fills up since those seats were at least partly filled on my flight today.

I had a regional flight on a Q300 today. My seat was changed at the gate, as it looked like passengers were mostly seated at the back but with separations. There was a mix of window and aisle allocations, so it wasn’t all window seating.

AKL-PMR yesterday morning was all window seats only and no one ahead of row 4..was pleasantly surprised at the effort that went into social distancing the flight even to getting off the plane row by row