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Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop (2022)

Chapter: 7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps

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Suggested Citation:"7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26375.
×

7

Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps

In the workshop’s final session, the moderators of sessions 2 through 5 provided summaries of each session.1 Moderators then took part in a broader discussion about the needs of the aviation industry in terms of capabilities, research, and next steps. The four moderators, each of whom was a member of the workshop planning committee, were Vicki Hertzberg of Emory University, Valerie Manning of Airbus, Andrew Lacher of Noblis, and Parimal “PK” Kopardekar of the NASA Ames Research Center. This session was moderated by committee member Ilan Kroo of Stanford University.

SUMMARIES

In introducing the session summaries, Kroo said that he asked the moderators of the four sessions to offer some of the highlights and, specifically, to address the question: What kind of research and subsequent developments are needed to ensure that the aviation industry and the traveling public can more effectively deal with potential future health crises and pandemics in air travel? The summaries were not intended as formal presentations, he emphasized, but rather descriptions of what the moderators thought were highlights or particularly interesting points.

Session 2: Policy and Procedures

Session 2, Hertzberg recalled, began with a presentation by Martin Cetron of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Cetron said that globally there has been a great deal of hubris and very little humility with regards to the power of Mother Nature. This has been clearly visible in dealing with the COVID pandemic. Cetron called for a better understanding of the relative contributions of different modes of transmission—airborne transmission, fomites, and others—and observed that contact tracing, which is a regular epidemiological practice in maintaining public health, is incredibly labor intensive. Thus, better technological solutions are needed for tracking COVID and other infectious diseases. However, any such solutions will need to safeguard the privacy of those people being traced.

Arjun Garg of Hogan Lovells, former counsel for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), had been the next speaker in session 2. As Hertzberg recounted, he called attention to various jurisdictional issues that can

___________________

1 Panel 1 had no moderator or panel discussion.

Suggested Citation:"7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26375.
×

play a role in the handling of a pandemic and that need to be considered before future pandemics arrive. One of his key messages was that the FAA is taking on more responsibility for regulating the health—instead of just the physical safety—of passengers and crew.

Lauren Beyer of Airlines for America (A4A) followed Garg. One of her main points, Hertzberg said, was the need for more investment in touchless technology all along the travel pathway; from the entry into the airport to boarding the plane, traveling, deplaning, and moving through the destination airport.

Steven Mayers, the director of customer experience at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, spoke last. As Hertzberg noted, he raised the question of how to encourage better behaviors and compliance among passengers for simple public health measures such as mask wearing. He also highlighted the discussion of how to determine which passenger populations needs to be targeted most intensively. Mayers spoke about the possibility of implementing better testing infrastructure, either at or close to airports. Delta Airlines established testing facilities at Hartsfield-Jackson for passengers on flights to Rome and London. Passengers simply arrived a bit early, were tested, and, if the results were negative, they were cleared to go.

Last, Hertzberg said, there was a question from the audience about the impact of COVID isolation on other diseases. The answer was that this isolation has limited the transmission of other diseases, such as influenza. There are still other diseases out there, Hertzberg noted, such as measles, which is highly contagious and can be very dangerous in some people, including young children and adults who have not been vaccinated or did not have it as children. It is important, Hertzberg concluded, to remember the lessons learned from the COVID pandemic and apply them to other diseases in the future, even to ordinary flu and childhood diseases.

Session 3: Aircraft Design and Flight Operations, Personnel, and Performance

The panel in session 3, Manning said, examined aircraft design along with flight operations, personnel, and performance, looking for ways in which these areas might change in response to passenger perceptions of the risks associated with air travel during a pandemic. The approaches discussed by the panelists fell into three streams: science and medicine, engineering, and operations. There are many stakeholders who must be involved in changes, she continued, including airlines, airports, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), government agencies, and more, and the different players are dependent upon one another. Thus, the roles of these stakeholders in responding to a pandemic, such as which ones will take the lead in certain areas, need to be worked out. “So, looking at only one of these is not the full answer,” Manning concluded, “but having various perspectives is.”

The scientists on the panel focused mainly on the issue of viral transmission, Manning continued, even looking back to previous pandemics to see what has been learned. A key conclusion is that much of the transmission is airborne. Engineers, by contrast, focus on ways of stopping transmission, not only the airborne transmission, but also transmission via surfaces. Key approaches include decreasing the movement of passengers and crew inside the cabin, having fewer interactions among passengers and crew, and less time in transit. The operator on the panel, Manning said, “focused on the crews and their expertise—expertise they had before, expertise they’ve gained, and, of course, what we can do to help them manage.”

The public asked various questions of the panel, such as when and where transmission is most likely. One of the most interesting questions, Manning said, was how the public can trust the aviation industry’s statements about the safety of flying because the financial health of the aviation industry depends upon getting more passengers to fly. One key will be to assemble as much data as possible about transmission rates during air travel and to be completely transparent about those data and what they imply. Passenger safety is important to airlines and others in the aviation industry, she continued, so transparency should be a natural behavior.

Other topics covered included end-to-end prevention, detection, and segregation. “How many passengers,” Manning asked, “are airlines ready to leave in the terminal owing to positive tests if we have rapid testing at the airport?” One thing to keep in mind is that the policies that were developed in the urgent early days of the pandemic may end up changing in response to a better and clearer understanding of the risks associated with flying.

On the topic of aircraft design, the OEMs are necessarily doing everything with the pandemic in mind because it has been just a little over a year since the pandemic began. Still, Manning continued, it is going to be vital that designers take into account transmission and air quality, perhaps in some new ways. That issue in turn led to

Suggested Citation:"7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26375.
×

the question of what measures that are already in place should be kept. Masks are an option, and the increased emphasis on cleaning and disinfection of both aircraft and airports should stay. “So, in short,” she summarized, “there are several aspects that are good, some that are still very unknown, but some that are giving us a good general direction to go.”

Going forward, aircraft industry stakeholders should keep in mind that they are all in this together. “This is not a topic on which OEMs compete or which we’re all fighting,” Manning said. “We all want people to feel safe traveling.” Pandemic-related concerns should not distract the industry from the other aspects of safety, she continued. “So, in terms of capabilities the crews—that’s flight, cabin, and maintenance—need to keep their competence high because we’ve lost quite a few and we’re continuing to have quite a lot of turnover, early retirement, and so on.” She predicted that there will be a “bubble of need” through perhaps 2022 or 2023. It will also be important that the aircraft are more resilient to not flying. Aircraft are designed to be flown regularly, and keeping them on the ground for long periods of time raises various maintenance and testing issues. That is a challenge that needs to be studied.

“We need to check that we understand the medical impacts, the science, the engineering, the operations on all of this as well,” Manning said in conclusion. “As we go longer term, new surfaces, new propulsion systems, new air traffic management systems, even new crewing systems may be impacted, which we may want to talk about.”

Session 4: Operations and Performance

In recapping the fourth session, Lacher chose to “step back” from the specifics of the panel’s presentations and instead identify five areas of research needs that were identified.

The first is related to the human perception of risk, particularly risk related to aviation. People often believe that the risks of aviation are greater than they really are, he said, and this heightened sense of risk is often referred to as “dread risk.” Something similar appears to be the case about travelers’ perceptions of the risks of contracting COVID during air travel. So, the first research and development (R&D) need Lacher identified was finding out what science says about the real risks of air travel during the COVID era. Further, there is the need to understand how to communicate those real risks in a manner that the traveling public will accept. “It needs to come from an authority that the traveling public will trust,” he said, “and perhaps that authority may not be the aviation industry.”

The second R&D area is travelers’ behavior and compliance with the rules, which some panelists observed tend to vary quite a lot among individual travelers. It is well known that human behavior is affected by various factors, including culture, nationality, age group, perspective, and political beliefs. It would be valuable to model travelers’ behavior as part of modeling the effectiveness of mitigation strategies. So, the second research need, Lacher said, is accumulating more data to illuminate travelers’ behavior and compliance with mitigation strategies. As part of that process, it will be necessary to establish standardized approaches to collecting, sharing, and protecting the privacy of the individuals’ data.

Vaccine passports or health passports was the third area of R&D need that Lacher spoke of. It is time to start thinking about an international standard for health-related travel documents, he said. The standard would have to go beyond just the travel industry and be shared with the medical community, for instance. This will require developing a mechanism that is flexible and that ensures authentication of the information along with an infrastructure for that information to be shared. The standards for all this should not just apply to the COVID of today but should be extendible and scalable to other future health-related crises.

In aviation safety, Lacher continued, data analytics has been the cornerstone of the safety improvements made in aviation over the years. “We spent a lot of time looking at aviation operational data to understand precursors of potential situations that may prove to create a safety risk,” he said. “We need a similar approach of data analytics to understand where health risks may exist in our air transportation system, and … we need science to inform decisions made by the policy makers. Data analytics would go a long way toward doing that.” That is the fourth R&D need.

Last, Lacher pointed to the need for improved testing. Many people in the workshop spoke of rapid tests for COVID, he noted, but he added that it is his understanding that “rapid test” refers to something that takes 15–30 minutes. Instead of a rapid test, the aviation industry needs a “near-instantaneous test” to be able to test people at an airport without disrupting the flow of people through the facility. It may not be possible, he added,

Suggested Citation:"7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26375.
×

but it would certainly make a huge difference in improving the safety of air travel and giving people confidence in the system.

Session 5: Aviation Economics

Reporting on the panel devoted to aviation economics, Kopardekar summarized each of the panelists’ presentations. Brian Pearce, the chief economist of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), spoke about the unprecedented losses experienced by the international air transport industry—approximately $173 billion. Countries are recovering at different rates. China is almost fully recovered in terms of domestic air travel, and the United States is also recovering on the domestic front. Yet, recovery in international travel is happening much more slowly. The pandemic wiped out an estimated 2 years of growth in the industry, and there could be some long-term structural implications due, in part, to the increased reliance on online remote meetings. Such meetings could lead to a long-term decrease of about 10 percent in airline travel compared with what would have happened without the pandemic.

Pearce’s main point, Kopardekar reported, was that governments around the world helped their airline industries, but to different degrees. The aid helped avoid major bankruptcies in the industry, but it left airlines and other companies in the sector burdened with a great deal of debt. A crisis of this magnitude in another industry would typically lead to consolidations, with stronger companies taking over weakened ones. Such consolidation is constrained in the aviation industry because of various government regulations on international ownership. Pearce suggested that such regulations should be given a second look with the goal of increasing the resiliency of the industry.

Kate Harback, the associate director of economics at the Institute of Health Economics, focused on three main factors shaping the aviation industry’s future in the wake of the COVID pandemic, Kopardekar said: demand, policy, and business models. She particularly emphasized the interplay among the three factors. For example, governmental policies related to border closings affected demand. This included demand not only for air travel, but also in other areas, such as that from Canadian citizens for Broadway shows in New York City.

Concerning business models, Harback offered the example of Nav Canada, a nonprofit organization funded by user fees that is in charge of air traffic control over Canada. The pandemic led to a reduction in air travel, resulting in a 56 percent drop in income from user fees. As such, Nav Canada increased user fees, which in turn affected demand. In preparing for future crises, it is important to take into account this interplay among demand, policy, and business models.

Kopardekar next described the presentation of Ronald Epstein, a senior equity analyst at Bank of America Global Research. Epstein reported, among other things, that the companies in the aviation sector most affected by the pandemic were those lower in the supply chain—the companies on tier 3, tier 4, and so on. These are the companies that will have the most difficulty recovering. Recovery will also vary according to other factors. An example that Epstein gave was that the market for narrow-body planes will recover faster than the market for wide-body planes, so the lower-tier companies supplying parts that will eventually become part of wide-body planes are particularly challenged. However, Epstein said that even while the aviation sector has been challenged by the pandemic, innovation has continued. For example, a new supersonic airliner could be available by the end of the decade. He also spoke about the implications of China entering the commercial airliner market with a new jet being developed.

Joel Otto, a strategy and business development executive at Collins Aerospace, a unit of Raytheon Technologies, was the final presenter of the panel. As Kopardekar reported, Otto spoke about the financial challenges faced by the aviation industry because of the COVID pandemic. It was the greatest disruption the industry had seen. However, there are also some new business opportunities. Otto mentioned, in particular, antimicrobial coatings and the use of biometrics to detect COVID and other infectious diseases. His main point, Kopardekar said, was the importance of using public-private partnerships to improve the travel experience and to ensure that it will be smoother and more seamless in the future to encourage the return of passengers. Otto also touched on the issue of developing strategic reserves so that the U.S. airline industry will be better prepared for pandemics and other future crises.

Overall, Kopardekar concluded, the panelists covered the economic effects of the pandemic on the aviation sector, potential paths to recovery, and strategies that might reduce the effects of such pandemics in the future.

Suggested Citation:"7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26375.
×

DISCUSSION

In introducing the discussion period in the workshop’s final session, Kroo asked the participants to “think not about next year’s recovery or the year after that, but 2030 or 2040.” This is not our last pandemic, he said. He asked people to think out into the future when bringing forth questions. With that, he looked to the sessions’ moderators to start things off.

Manning began with a question about what should be tested. Looking to the future, there will be infectious diseases other than COVID. How does one decide where the threshold is to begin testing? Should, for example, people be tested for the flu? Should the air travel industry set a goal of stopping the transmission of pretty much anything? Where should the line be drawn?

Kroo commented that it has been exciting to see recent papers in electrobiochemistry in which researchers were describing noninvasive tests that could give results in one or two minutes. Such testing may be available much sooner than 2030 or 2040.

Hertzberg brought up the sniffer dogs that Cetron had mentioned. The dogs can detect the COVID virus in infectious people. She referred to his comment that relatively little has been spent on developing a detection capacity using such dogs. “I would take it a step further and say you could train robots to do that intake and do that testing, too,” she said. “That’s the kind of future I think is coming,” and it will be here relatively soon, she predicted—by the end of the decade, if not several years earlier.

Lacher chimed in that he believed Manning’s question went deeper. The question was aimed at the issue of what diseases should be a focus of concern for international travel—not just for testing, but perhaps for vaccination as well. Should passengers be tested for the flu? Should they show papers proving they have been vaccinated for measles? How do we draw the line?

Manning clarified that she was pointing out that the air travel industry is now sensitive to the fact that an infectious disease can substantially shut down air travel for a significant period of time. “Where does that sensitivity take us,” she asked, “and what can the dangers be?” She offered the example of the airline industry adding locks to cockpit doors after 9/11. However, in a 2015 incident one pilot was out of the cockpit and could not get back in. This incident raised the question of whether airlines should continue to lock those cockpit doors in flight. Similarly, the airlines are installing an entire testing apparatus in response to COVID. How long should that be maintained? Should it be used for other purposes?

Public health experts are good at simulating scenarios and making decisions from a public health perspective, Hertzberg said. However, it would be valuable to broaden those scenarios to take into account more factors than the traditional public health ones—what the financial effects will be on airlines, for instance, or how various groups of people might react to various policy decisions. She also suggested getting people who think far outside the box to imagine different scenarios that the air travel industry might face in the future. The industry could then analyze some of those scenarios to assess their potential implications. After all, she said, before 9/11 no one had imagined people might fly airplanes into buildings on purpose. What other possible scenarios are being ignored?

Kroo then passed along a question that had been posted on the workshop site: Given the reality of limited budgets, what are the top three research challenges that should be addressed? Hertzberg suggested that one area should be the development and improvement of touchless technologies, so that airlines can offer “a seamless, touchless experience from door to door.”

Manning pointed to the area of data analytics, including the collection, filtering, and analysis of data in the correct way. Another aspect of data analytics when involving people is maintaining the security and privacy of the data. People need to feel comfortable that their data are secure, she said. Hertzberg commented that safeguarding privacy can become very difficult—the “fly in the ointment,” so to speak. Lacher responded that the aviation industry has a track record of doing just that—sharing aviation safety data but, deidentifying the data in such a way that people’s privacy is maintained. Even in the case of pilots reporting an unsafe situation, the industry has ways of maintaining the anonymity of the pilots to improve the safety of air travel without violating the pilot’s privacy.

Pointing to another research area, Kopardekar said that it would be useful to model various disruptive events and scenarios, using data from past disruptions, to predict the repercussions of events and improve the resiliency

Suggested Citation:"7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26375.
×

of the system. The models should encompass the entire aviation value chain, he suggested, so it is possible to analyze how these disruptions affect pieces, such as the supply chain and the business model.

Workshop chair John-Paul Clarke referred to studies of virus transmission on aircraft and suggested that flight attendants and other air travel personnel may serve as a vector for passing the virus to others because they come into contact with so many people. It might make sense to have different rules for these personnel than for passengers, perhaps having such workers wear masks even though the passengers do not have to.

Speaking of simulations, Hertzberg referred to a point that Steven Mayers of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport made about airports having jurisdictional authorities. Simulations should take into account those factors, she suggested. Building on that, Hertzberg noted that different countries around the world have varying policies regarding COVID and other health-related issues. Air travel is a rather regulated and standardized industry, she said, but this is an area in which there are no predetermined standards or expectations. This variability leads to uncertainty for both people and airlines.

Switching gears, Clarke commented that while touchless technology holds promise for reducing transmission, it cannot be the only answer. Even with touchless technology, people in airports are still crowded close together in places like the security stations or boarding gates, increasing the risk of airborne transmission. He suggested that it would be valuable to develop methods of routing people through the various parts of the airport process in such a way that crowding could be minimized and to maintain social distancing. Even without concerns about reducing disease transmission, he added, passengers would appreciate a system where they showed up right on time for their flight. Figuring out how to do this effectively, with the goal of reducing contact time for everyone in the airport, would be an important and interesting research challenge.

Lacher spoke about an area of potential automation: in Alaska people are very dependent on air transportation for delivery of most supplies. However, there have been concerns about the pilots of cargo planes landing in remote locations bringing COVID to that place if they were infected. So, some suggested the possibility of using pilotless cargo aircraft to reduce the risk of transmission. This technology is not yet available, he noted, but it is one option for reducing the risk of transmission via air transportation.

Another important area of research and development, Kopardekar said, would be work on antimicrobial materials for use in aircraft. Such materials can be used during the manufacture and cleaning of certain items that get touched frequently, such as food trays. Manning added that there are a number of characteristics such products should have, particularly if they are going to be used regularly. Airlines will want to avoid processes that are too labor intensive, for example, particularly if they must be performed regularly to keep things cleaned and disinfected. There is ongoing research into different types of cleaning processes, she said—not just liquid cleaning products, but things like ultraviolet light and heat.

In closing, Clarke thanked all the moderators and panelists. “I think we were treated to food for thought,” he said, “which is what the National Academies should be all about.”

Suggested Citation:"7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26375.
×
Page 49
Suggested Citation:"7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26375.
×
Page 50
Suggested Citation:"7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26375.
×
Page 51
Suggested Citation:"7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26375.
×
Page 52
Suggested Citation:"7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26375.
×
Page 53
Suggested Citation:"7 Critically Needed Capabilities, Research, and Next Steps." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Aviation After a Year of Pandemic: Economics, People, and Technology: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26375.
×
Page 54
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Among the various segments of society affected by the COVID-19 pandemic over the past year and a half, few were hit as hard as the aviation industry. At its worst point, in March 2020, passenger volumes for U.S. airlines had dropped more than 95 percent. Airlines, airports, aircraft manufacturers, and other components of the air travel system faced an unprecedented challenge, with threats to the health of passengers and crews combined with threats to the financial health of the entire system.

To address the many COVID-related issues facing the aviation industry, on June 28-30, 2021, the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted a three-day workshop, Aviation After a Year of Pandemic - Economics, People, and Technology. Funded by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration and held remotely via Zoom, the workshop focused on four specific areas regarding the effects of COVID on the aviation industry: economics, personnel, technology, and next steps. This publication summarizes the presentation and discussion of the workshop.

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