Letters | Why Hongkong Post’s airmail services to the UK and the US are still disrupted

Name: Tracking the massive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the world’s airline industry in early 2020
Uploaded: 2020-09-10T22:35:19.000Z
Duration: 3 min 51 s
Description: Tracking the massive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the world’s airline industry in early 2020

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A cargo aircraft operated by Cathay Pacific takes off from Hong Kong International Airport. Air traffic capacity – along with airmail service – has been affected by the pandemic. Photo: Bloomberg

Letters

Published: 6:35am, 11 Sep 2020Updated: 6:35am, 11 Sep 2020

I refer to the letters from Mr Patrick B. Paul (“Hong Kong must not let Covid-19 kill airmail services to the UK and beyond”, September 2), Mr Ian Howard (“Why is airmail service to UK still suspended”, September 8), and Ms Suzanna Pepper (“If Speedpost can reach US, airmail can too”, September 9) concerning the interruptions of our airmail services, in particular to Britain and the United States.

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic poses an unprecedented challenge to the global aviation industry. Given that many of Hongkong Post’s airline contractors have substantially reduced their flights or simply been operating on a skeleton schedule, the number of overseas destinations that we could access has been changing for the past couple of months.

In the case of airmail services to Britain and the US, which are our major overseas destinations, the air traffic capacity that we could secure was unable to support the volume of the outbound traffic. Having no better alternative, we could only announce the suspension of airmail services to both Britain and the US on March 27, followed by the suspension of Speedpost services to those destinations on April 14.

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Tracking the massive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the world’s airline industry in early 2020

Since the service suspensions, we have been working with airlines on an early resumption of our services, including the use of cargo flights. With the gradual scaling up of air traffic capacity to both Britain and the US recently, we resumed Speedpost services on June 19 to cater for customers with urgent mail. Subsequently, e-Express services to Britain and the US were resumed on July 3 and September 1 respectively. Yet, the air capacity is still unable to support the volume of other airmail services to the two countries at this stage.

We fully understand the expectation of members of the public and businesses for an early resumption of a full range of airmail services, and we thank them for their patience as we have been working hard to respond to the unique challenges over the past months. We will continue to spare no effort in working towards the resumption of the full range of airmail services to Britain and the US as well as other destinations as soon as the situation permits.

Patrick Lin, assistant postmaster general (business development), Hongkong Post