AIR PASSENGER RIGHTS IN TIMES OF PANDEMIC BETWEEN EXTRAORDINARY CANCELLATIONS, DENIED REIMBURSEMENTS AND FORCED VOUCHERS

The Covid-19 pandemic has taken its toll on air transport, forcing many airlines to cancel flights as a result of the restrictive measures adopted by the authorities or due to other reasons related to the emergency. The remedies, stemming from EU law, of ticket refunds and compensation for damages may expose carriers to serious liquidity crises and bankruptcy. The aim of this article is to discuss the opportunity to provide for compulsory vouchers in lieu of immediate reimbursement, which passengers could not refuse on condition that they have a reasonable content, with a view to enhancing competition in the European air transport market. © 2022 Ibero-American Law Institute. All rights reserved.

Analytic hierarchy clustering research of all cargo airlines based on safety information

Due to the COVID-19, air passenger transport industry is sluggishm. At the same time, based on the strong demand for freight business. Airlines focus on developing cargo sector. All-cargo airlines are gradually being established. The number of registered cargo aircraft has gradually increased in recent years,and cargo transport flight hours are gradually increasing. This leads to an increase in cargo aviation security incidents. The safety information analysis of cargo aircraft needs to be solved urgently. In this paper, a hierarchical analysis and clustering research on all-cargo airlines based on China aviaiton safety information data is carried out. The results show that all-cargo airlines security incidents are divided into three categories. The paper provides security recommendations for different incident categories. © 2022 IEEE.

Quantifying the Impact of Air Travel on Growth of COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

This paper develops models to quantify the dynamics of the impact of air travel on the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, using a wide range of datasets covering the period from March to December 2020. With the help of flight operation data, we first develop a novel approach to estimate the county-level daily air passenger traffic, which combines passenger load factor estimates and information about the air traffic distribution. Cross-sectional models using aggregated county-level variables are estimated. While this study focuses on air travel variables, we also control for potential spatial autocorrelation and other relevant covariates, including vehicle miles traveled (VMT), road network connectivity, demographic characteristics, and climate. The model results indicate that air travel has a strong and positive impact on the initial pandemic growth rate for both case-based and fatality-based aggregate models. © ATM 2021. All rights reserved.

A Tabu Search Algorithm for the Optimization of the Long Term Parking of Aircraft

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic lead to a virtual standstill of air passenger traffic in the spring of that same year. While some travel restrictions have since been lifted, passenger air travel is not expected to return to pre-coronavirus levels for several years. Then the question arises of how to park the large amounts of grounded aircraft efficiently, minimizing valuable airport space used. While aircraft parking for this purpose is a largely unexplored area in academic literature, the problem shows similarities with cutting and packing problems which have been researched for many years. Hence, the proposed model in the paper is modelled similar to that of the irregular strip packing model, where a fixed width is used and the length of the parking layout is to be minimized. Aircraft are represented as non-convex polygons and are allowed to rotate in discrete intervals. The concept of the no-fit polygon (NFP) is used in order to prevent overlap between aircraft. A tabu search algorithm with an adaptive tabu list is proposed in order to optimize the sequence and orientations in which the aircraft are placed onto the placement area using a bottom-left (BL) placement strategy. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, several instances are created and tested using computational experiments. © 2022, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc, AIAA. All rights reserved.

A Year Into the Pandemic: A Passenger Perspective on its Impact at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the air transportation system, its structure, its reliability, and its dynamics. Passengers have in turn significantly adapted their behavior. Through a case study at Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport, the present paper examines the new traffic network, the fact that delays remain high despite a drop in flight volume, the significant decrease in aircraft load factors and the change in passenger behavior at the airport. © 2021 IEEE.

Research on warning and monitoring mechanism of economic operation of air passenger transport economic operation under the impact of COVID-19

The COVID-19 has had a great impact on the global air transport industry. This paper analyzes the impact on China's air economic operation, including the current situation, challenges and problems of the regulation mechanism. A warning system for the economic operation of air passenger transport industry is conducted. With the help of warning lights, it reflects the degree of hotness or coldness of economic operation in 2011-2020.In addition, the study establishes the BP neural network forecast model to predict the economic operation of civil aviation industry in the next three years, and proposes the specific early warning management mechanism from five aspects. The conclusion of this study provides a strong support for guiding the civil aviation industry to prevent economic operation risks and improving the anti-vulnerability and resilience of the development of China's civil aviation industry. © 2021 IEEE

The Use of Chernoff Faces to Depict Losses in the Number of Passengers Transported by Air in Australia

The article uses Chernoff faces to depict air passenger losses in Australia - caused by the 2020 COVID-19 infectious disease pandemic. The research began with an analysis and evaluation of the number of passengers transported by air in Australia from January 2010 to January 2021. In order to show the economic losses, the forecast of the considered time series from January 2010 to December 2019 for 2020 was conducted. © 2021 Kaunas University of Technology. All rights reserved.

Strategies at points of entry to reduce importation risk of COVID-19 cases and reopen travel.

BACKGROUND: With more countries exiting lockdown, public health safety requires screening measures at international travel entry points that can prevent the reintroduction or importation of the severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus-2. Here, we estimate the number of cases captured, quarantining days averted and secondary cases expected to occur with screening interventions. METHODS: To estimate active case exportation risk from 153 countries with recorded coronavirus disease-2019 cases and deaths, we created a simple data-driven framework to calculate the number of infectious and upcoming infectious individuals out of 100 000 000 potential travellers from each country, and assessed six importation risk reduction strategies; Strategy 1 (S1) has no screening on entry, S2 tests all travellers and isolates test-positives where those who test negative at 7 days are permitted entry, S3 the equivalent but for a 14 day period, S4 quarantines all travellers for 7 days where all are subsequently permitted entry, S5 the equivalent for 14 days and S6 the testing of all travellers and prevention of entry for those who test positive. RESULTS: The average reduction in case importation across countries relative to S1 is 90.2% for S2, 91.7% for S3, 55.4% for S4, 91.2% for S5 and 77.2% for S6. An average of 79.6% of infected travellers are infectious upon arrival. For the top 100 exporting countries, an 88.2% average reduction in secondary cases is expected through S2 with the 7-day isolation of test-positives, increasing to 92.1% for S3 for 14-day isolation. A substantially smaller reduction of 30.0% is expected for 7-day all traveller quarantining, increasing to 84.3% for 14-day all traveller quarantining. CONCLUSIONS: The testing and isolation of test-positives should be implemented provided good testing practices are in place. If testing is not feasible, quarantining for a minimum of 14 days is recommended with strict adherence measures in place.

Estimating and projecting air passenger traffic during the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak and its socio-economic impact.

Due to the coronavirus global crisis, most countries have put in place restrictive measures in order to confine the pandemia and contain the number of casualties. Among the restrictive measures, air traffic suspension is certainly quite effective in reducing the mobility on the global scale in the short term but it also has high socio-economic impact on the long and short term. The main focus of this study is to collect and prepare data on air passengers traffic worldwide with the scope of analyze the impact of travel ban on the aviation sector. Based on historical data from January 2010 till October 2019, a forecasting model is implemented in order to set a reference baseline. Making use of airplane movements extracted from online flight tracking platforms and on-line booking systems, this study presents also a first assessment of recent changes in flight activity around the world as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. To study the effects of air travel ban on aviation and in turn its socio-economic, several scenarios are constructed based on past pandemic crisis and the observed flight volumes. It turns out that, according to these hypothetical scenarios, in the first Quarter of 2020 the impact of aviation losses could have negatively reduced World GDP by 0.02% to 0.12% according to the observed data and, in the worst case scenarios, at the end of 2020 the loss could be as high as 1.41-1.67% and job losses may reach the value of 25-30 millions. Focusing on EU27, the GDP loss may amount to 1.66-1.98% by the end of 2020 and the number of job losses from 4.2 to 5 millions in the worst case scenarios. Some countries will be more affected than others in the short run and most European airlines companies will suffer from the travel ban. We hope that these preliminary results may be of help for informed policy making design of exit strategies from this global crisis.