World News for Students of English

21-12-2020 15:00

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a big fall in air travel. At the worst point, two thirds of all planes did not fly. Operators parked the planes on runways where they stayed for months.

Now, planes are starting to fly again, but many people worry that they are not safe enough. Experts said that there could be technical problems, for example, empty batteries in emergency systems. It is also not clear how airlines maintained the planes which did not fly for a long time. Another problem can be that pilots did not have any training, and they can have problems when they operate a plane.

This year, there were many accidents when pilots landed and problems with the right speed or altitude. Experts said that pilots needed to go to train before they could fly with real planes again.

Difficult words: runway (a flat place where a plane takes off or lands), maintain (to take care about something and keep it in a good state), operate (to control a machine), altitude (how high something is above sea level).

You can watch the original video in the Level 3 section.