Qatar Airways Continues with Cargo Operations

In recent weeks, Qatar Airways has carried over one million people home, plus transported over 70,000 tons of medical equipment and aid relief, ensuring it is a reliable partner for passengers, governments, travel trade and freight companies in extremely challenging circumstances.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented challenge for Qatar Airways and the aviation industry as a whole. While the airline continues to maintain operations where possible to take people home and to transport essential supplies, overall demand for air transport has declined significantly.

Passenger operations
According to a press release by the company, since mid-February, Qatar Airways has helped reunite over one million passengers with their loved ones, operating a mix of scheduled and charter services plus extra sectors. In the past several weeks, the airline has helped repatriate over 45,000 passengers back home to France, 70,000 home to Germany and over 100,000 customers back to the United Kingdom. Working with governments and group travel companies around the world, the airline operated over 90 charters and extra sector flights taking home over 26,000 stranded travelers.
The demand to help get stranded travelers home has also seen Qatar Airways operate flights to new destinations such as Brisbane, Christchurch and Toronto. The national carrier of the State of Qatar continues to operate approximately 60 scheduled flights a day to around 40 destinations and is working closely with embassies across the globe to arrange charters to repatriate stranded citizens.

Cargo operations
With global air freight capacity declining, Qatar Airways Cargo has increased operations to ensure the continuity of global trade and movement of essential medical and aid supplies. The airline continues to operate a significant cargo schedule with almost 100 flights per day, during the past month the cargo operator has worked closely with governments and NGOs to transport over 70,000 tons of medical and aid supplies to impacted regions around the world on both scheduled and charter services, the equivalent of roughly 700 fully loaded Boeing 777 freighters. To continue to fulfil demand the Group’s cargo division is also utilizing passenger aircraft to carry freight-only to destinations in China, Europe, India and the Middle East.
To Budapest, there will be three cargo flights a week: on Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays with Airbus A330 aircraft.