Emirates says it has become among the first airlines in the world to operate a flight with fully vaccinated frontline teams servicing customers at every touchpoint of the travel journey. Flight EK215 from Los Angeles to Dubai departed Tuesday supported by 70 vaccinated frontline team members across the operational spectrum.

The Dubai-based carrier notes that close to 26,000 members of its frontline aviation workforce have already vaccinated with two doses. In this case, it included check-in, security, business- and first-class lounge and boarding gate employees, as well as engineers, pilots, and cabin crew who made the choice to be fully vaccinated.

Also supporting the flight’s operations were loading and special handling teams from airport services provider, dnata, as well as SkyCargo teams working on cargo and logistics requirements.

The Emirates Group rolled out its vaccination drive just over a month ago, and since then, close to 44 percent of the Group’s UAE frontline aviation workforce have received both doses of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Sinopharm vaccines.

Emirates Airline COO Adel Al Redha said, “Protecting our people with vaccinations is important – for them, for our community, for the smooth running of our operations, and also for our customers as it introduces of an additional layer of protection when they travel with us.

“We’ve seen a very positive response with high demand and take-up of the COVID-19 vaccine from our colleagues at the operational frontline, and there’s continued momentum in the rate of vaccinations across the business.”

With the Group’s vaccination centres running 12 hours a day, every day of the week, nearly 5,000 cabin and flight deck crew plus thousands of employees in other roles have opted to receive both doses of the Covid-19 vaccine.

Al Redha said, “We are also confident that with more people being vaccinated, combined with strong safety measures in place, we can all look forward to the easing of border entry guidelines for many countries.”

The UAE currently has one of the world’s highest rate of vaccinations for its citizens and residents as it fights to curb the spread of COVID-19. So far, the UAE has administered over 5.4 million doses of vaccine, and Our World in Data, a research website based at Oxford University, recently reported that the country’s distribution rate stands at 55.27 doses per 100 people, ranking it the second highest in the world.