Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Cawley. It's Tuesday

the 17th of March. And I'm at Heathrow Terminal 4 and very quiet. It is too. I've just had a word

with the server in one of the catering outlets at Terminal 4, I said,

if a normal day is 100, what is the level of busyness right now? And the response was,

right now, 10. I think that's possibly an exaggeration.

I'm looking here at the departures board.

And there's a fair number of flights, for instance, to Amsterdam on KLM.

Also to various destinations flying on Voiling, the Spanish non-cost airline, going to places like Barcelona,

Santiago de Compostello, Bill Bao, and indeed even Paris, Wally.

As well as that, Kenya Airways reliably going into Nairobi Air France to Paris and Korean air to Seoul.

But what's not here at scale are the Gulf Airlines.

You would normally expect Qatar Airways to just be filling plane after plane after plane heading off to Doha for connections across Africa, Asia and Australasia.

But that is not happening.

There are also actually a flight last night to Doha, a rare event.

You've also got airlines such as Kuwait Airways, Gulf Air.

Now, they have done something smart.

Bahrain is the home of Gulf Air.

It's currently closed in terms of airspace.

So the airline is going into Damam, which is in Saudi Arabia.

Not too far away, you can get there on the causeway, so you are going to get there.

Abu Dhabi served by Etihad is getting maybe one flight a day. It really isn't significant.

It's always been a bit of a Cinderella terminal. It was built in the 1980s, not because anybody thought it was a particularly good idea

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