The global pandemic has bought serious disruption to individuals and businesses around the world. Businesses have had to adjust working procedures, ensuring that employees’ safety is paramount and new procedures are in place to protect against COVID-19, while maintaining operations as much as possible.
Oil, Gas & Energy is certainly an industry seeing changes during COVID-19. With massive investment into projects offshore, fracking and new renewable energy sources, there is a need to either stop projects to save on costs or continue with projects where the cost implication of stopping outweighs this.
At Air Partner, we have been closely supporting our energy clients with their vital operations during COVID-19, providing critical charter flight services and safeguarding measures to ensure businesses remain on track.
A lot of these operations are large-scale, in hard to reach destinations which has meant COVID-19 has bought about a higher degree of disruption and uncertainty.
In the short term, our energy clients are taking steps to ensure the safety of their workers while ensuring key operations continue – with the longer term of objective of ensuring the industry sustains development and meet demand. With the longer-term view in mind, our clients’ operations must continue during COVID-19.
Providing clients with critical crew rotation flights
As our clients have a requirement to keep their operations on track, we’ve been supporting with essential crew rotation flights, flying key workers in and out of areas where clients’ projects are based. The flexibility of charter flights allows us to work closely with clients to tailor the service to their exact requirements. As a leader in global aviation services, we’re perfectly placed to support clients with a number of services to help their operations. We can supply both private jets (for up to 19 passengers) and commercial jets (for larger groups of more than 20), depending on the number of essential workers that our clients are looking to transport. We have also been supporting with freight services, all of which combined have been helping clients in difficult times.
With crew rotation flights, we can react quickly to clients’ requirements, providing swift turnarounds which are important whilst times are uncertain. Our expert team are always up to date with the latest information on borders and airport opening and closures, allowing us to support flights with tailored information and advice. Whilst there are restrictions in place in many countries globally, we have been working through the intricacies, with local support.
Charter flights are essential to mitigate the impact of reduced scheduled flights
As the COVID-19 pandemic started to spread globally, scheduled airlines swiftly halted their services and grounded entire fleets, on a widespread scale never seen before. It remains uncertain when these airlines will start operating flights again and certainly, there is evidence to suggest that it may be a very long time before full capacity and flight routes will be restored.
This is where private charter flights are providing an essential service, allowing businesses to fly their key workers on a dedicated charter flight instead, wherever they need to be. At Air Partner, we’re seeing an increase in requests from new energy clients who would usually use scheduled flights to transport their workers but are now unable to do so. We expect this demand to continue in the future even once scheduled services largely resume as private charter can offer many benefits to mitigate risks against the backdrop of the pandemic, allowing businesses to avoid crowded airport areas and providing control of the on-board environment.
The importance of having an Air Evacuation Plan
With a large amount of energy companies with employees based in risk areas, working on essential operations, having an Emergency Air Evacuation Plan remains of paramount importance. This allows companies to safeguard their employees, especially during these unpredictable times. It provides clients with a country-specific evacuation plan, tailored to their requirements and a range of other benefits, including quick response evacuation, access to a line of credit for an emergency flight, and a range of other medical and security services. All of which are crucial to ensure clients can adhere to their duty of care and quickly evacuate their employees should any type of emergency occur.
Air Partner Protect to safeguard clients and their essential workers
When COVID-19 initially started to impact individuals and businesses globally, we launched Air Partner Protect, a unique product allowing our clients to safeguard their flights, mitigate risk and be provided with guidance and reassurance during the outbreak. Our tailored support has been well-received by clients and allows them to protect their employees during these unprecedented times. Such measures are of paramount importance to energy clients flying essential workers, such as our approved operators who are compliant with recommended COVID-19 procedures, providing aircraft deep cleaning and crew adhering to recommended hygiene policies. Additionally, we can provide security screening and medical support, tailored to our clients’ requirements.
Keeping safety a top priority
Safety is always a driving consideration in the Oil & Gas industry, which is why throughout COVID-19, we continue to offer our clients in this sector advanced safety, fatigue risk management and airworthiness audits, assessment services through Baines Simmons, our world leading aviation safety consultancy. Baines Simmons helps organizations in the industry to manage their Organizational Safety and Risk Performance, as well as apply Safety and Performance techniques as a catalyst for creating a Performance-Based Environment (PBE) – providing ultimately safer operations and invaluable peace of mind.
