Heathrow boss says UK pre-arrival testing must be temporary

LONDON - Heathrow Airport CEO John Holland-Kaye said that new rules requiring people arriving in England to present a negative COVID-19 test result must only be temporary and the government must plan for how to end it.

"It can only be a temporary measure," Holland-Kaye told BBC Radio on Friday. "We need to have a roadmap for how we get out of this because aviation is vital to us as a small island trading nation."

He also said that vaccination programmes in Britain and other countries gave him hope for a travel recovery later this year. "We'll see flights starting to come back and passenger numbers building up through the summer and then into the autumn," he said.