The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) announced on Wednesday the lifting from Monday of the obligation to wear a mask at airports and on board planes in the European Union (EU), decreed to counter the progression of COVID-19.
“From next week, face masks will no longer need to be mandatory for air travel,” EASA Director General Patrick Ky said in a statement. This decision “is a big step forward in the standardization of air transport”.
Despite the decision of the EASA, Germany, the first economy and the most populous country in the EU, has indicated that it has no intention of lifting the obligation to wear a mask on its planes.
Its airline Lufthansa and its Frankfurt airport are the first in Europe in their category.
“The mask obligation on planes remains in place for all domestic flights as well as for flights that take off and land in Germany,” according to a statement from the spokesperson for the German Minister of Health, Hanno Kautz.
Countries and airlines will decide
EASA explained that a face mask remains one of the best protections against the transmission of COVID-19, especially for vulnerable people, and that the rules regarding masks in particular “will continue to vary between airlines. beyond this date” of next Monday.
For example, “mask wearing should remain encouraged on flights to or from a destination where mask wearing is still required on public transport,” according to the agency.
In general, passengers must “behave responsibly and respect the choices of others around them”, underlines the EASA. Clearly, a passenger “who is coughing and sneezing should strongly consider wearing a face mask, to reassure people seated nearby”.
The main global association of airlines, IATA, has welcomed the new EASA protocol, which amounts to giving travelers “the freedom to choose whether or not to wear a mask”, according to Willie Walsh, its director general.
Passengers “can travel with confidence knowing that many features of the aircraft cabin, such as high-frequency air exchange and high-efficiency filters, make it one of the most safe,” he said.
This relaxation of health protection rules comes as Europeans’ appetite for travel, curbed during two years of the pandemic, is gaining momentum.
For the summer, European air traffic watchdog Eurocontrol predicts travel will recover to 95% of 2019 levels, with bookings booming despite the war in Ukraine, the oil shock and inflation.