REDUCED TRANSMISSION RISKS FOR PASSENGER OPERATIONS DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC

In the aircraft cabin, passengers must share a confined environment with other passengers during boarding, flight, and disembarkation, which poses a risk for virus transmission and requires risk-appropriate mitigation strategies. Spacing between passenger groups during boarding and disembarkation reduces the risk of transmission, and optimized sequencing of passenger groups helps to significantly reduce boarding and disembarkation time. We considered passenger groups to be an important factor in overall operational efficiency. The basic idea of our concept is that the members of a group should not be separated, since they were already traveling as a group before entering the aircraft. However, to comply with COVID-19 regulations, different passenger groups should be separated spatially. For the particular challenge of disembarkation, we assume that passenger groups will be informed directly when they are allowed to leave for disembarkation. Today, cabin lighting could be used for this information process, but in a future digitally connected cabin, passengers could be informed directly via their personal devices. These devices could also be used to check the required distances between passengers. The implementation of optimized group sequencing has the potential to significantly reduce boarding and disembarkation times, taking into account COVID-19 constraints. © 2022 ICAS. All Rights Reserved.

Evaluation of technology-supported distance measuring to ensure safe aircraft boarding during covid-19 pandemic

With the rise of COVID-19, the sustainability of air transport is a major challenge, as there is limited space in aircraft cabins, resulting in a higher risk of virus transmission. In order to detect possible chains of infection, technology-supported apps are used for social distancing. These COVID-19 applications are based on the display of the received signal strength for distance estimation, which is strongly influenced by the spreading environment due to the signal multipath reception. Therefore, we evaluate the applicability of technology-based social distancing methods in an aircraft cabin environment using a radio propagation simulation based on a three-dimensional aircraft model. We demonstrate the susceptibility to errors of the conventional COVID-19 distance estimation, which can lead to large errors in the determination of distances and to the impracticability of traditional tracing approaches during passenger boarding/deboarding. In the context of the future connected cabin, a robust distance measurement must be implemented to ensure safe travel. Finally, our results can be transferred to similar fields of application, e.g., trains or public transport. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.