COVID-19 passenger operations

28 September 2022

Pandemiegerechte Passagierprozesse in der Flugzeugkabine
^{M Schultz, M Soolaki, J Fuchte, O Michler, P Schwarzbach. 71. Deutscher Luft- und Raumfahrtkongress 2022}

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 appropriate risk mitigation strategies. Distancing passengers during boarding and disembarkation reduces the risk of transmission, and optimized sequencing of passengers and passenger groups helps to significantly reduce process times. Consideration of groups traveling together is an important influencing factor. The basic idea of our concept is that the members of a travel group should not be separated, as they were already in close contact before boarding the aircraft. However, in order to comply with COVID-19 regulations, the different passenger groups should still be physically separated. The disembarkation process poses a particular challenge in this regard, as the passenger groups must be informed directly when they are allowed to disembark. Already today, cabin lighting could be used for this information process, but in a future, digitally networked cabin, passengers could be informed directly via their mobile devices. These devices could also be used to check the required distances between passengers. In the developed simulation environment, we can show that the implementation of optimized group sequencing under COVID-19 conditions has the potential to reduce process times by up to 59% and transmission risk by up to 85%.

Link to publication: ResearchGate.