I finally shelled out the $ for the paid version of a flight radar app because I was curious. The friendly skies are mostly empty. 85ish% of all flights in and out of Bay Area is from/to China.
I always had the free version but the paid version will ping me every time a flight goes over me(my phone actually) and for a mere $6.99/month, I can find out the air traffic of the area. It’s an affordable hobby for covid. I highly recommend it.
I don’t know what it really means but just an observation.
You may be looking at freight flights. There are 8 (4 until recently) pairs of commercial passenger flights between US and mainland China per week. 2 of those starts/ends Bay Area.
That's not the same thing at all. There's always been a flight a week from the US to China, so even if it takes a while, it's still possible. Especially so with at least a month's notice.
In the long run, we're all dead. Or perhaps just cured of covid.
There's ~375k Chinese students in the US. At one flight a week, it would take over 20 years for all to return home (to be fair, there's actually 4 flights a week I believe -- so merely 5 years). This is a de-facto blocking of citizens from returning.
And no, you can't just "wait" a month. As a sibling commenter noted, the best they could find were October tickets.
Li Hui decided to return home long ago, but the "cheap tickets" she had booked twice had their flights cancelled. Now, she can't find any ticket with a price of less than 40,000 yuan. The tickets she might be able to book are almost all from 60,000 upwards. Of course, these tickets are in the hands of some scalpers. Many Chinese students around her who want to return to China are booking high-price tickets through scalpers.
The article is from June. Those were flights she had booked in February/April for May/June. They got canceled because of the pandemic. Same for the next flight. And all others after that. The airline couldn't reschedule her for the next flight because it wasn't flying.
