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The Aviation Industry’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
By any measure, the COVID-19 pandemic has massively disrupted the world’s aviation industry, so that the industry has had no option but to find ways to adapt to and deal with—and survive—this crisis. The actions that the aviation industry has taken in response to the pandemic and the actions that they are planning to make, or may make in the future, were discussed by a number of presenters. This chapter describes those discussions.
Josh Cohn, the director of airport planning at InterVistas, put this in context. “Aviation really isn’t a stranger to disruption,” he said, mentioning such things as the changes brought about by the 1958 invention of the modern boarding bridge, which revolutionized how passengers got on and off airplanes how terminals were designed; the 1970 introduction of the Boeing 747, which, by transporting 300–400 passengers, allowed international travel to grow on a large scale and created the need to process passengers faster as they came back into the country; the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which revolutionized approaches to security; and the introduction of the Airbus 380, which, because of its size and weight, forced designers to rethink how airfields works, how aprons work, how thick the pavement needs to be, how the plane’s larger wing clearances would effect movement onto the runway, and how to get passengers from a double-decker jet to the terminal. “Maybe it’s the eternal optimist in me,” Cohn said, “but I think what we’ve seen in the industry over the last 60 years has brought opportunity for new ideas and ways to make the industry better.”
AIRLINES’ RESPONSE TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Several speakers provided details on how airlines responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Laurie Garrow, co-director of the Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility at the Georgia Institute of Technology, provided a broad overview of the response of airlines to the pandemic. David Garrison, senior vice president for corporate safety, security, and compliance at Delta Airlines, described Delta’s approach to handling the pandemic. Michael Delaney, the chief aerospace safety officer and senior vice president of global aerospace safety at Boeing, and also a member of the workshop planning committee, described what actions Boeing took in response to the pandemic and, in particular, the establishment of the Confident Travel Initiative. And similarly, Stefan Roemelt, senior vice president of engineering, cabin and cargo at Airbus, offered an overview of Airbus’s response to the pandemic.
Challenges and Responses in the Airline Industry
In her overview of the airline industry’s response to the pandemic, Garrow said that two of the airlines’ main focuses were finding new revenue streams to make up for the loss of passenger ticket sales and making sure that in the reduced number of passenger flights, both passengers and crew, were protected from the virus.
One way that airlines found new revenue was by an increased focus on carrying cargo. In some cases, for instance, the cabins of passenger jets were converted to be able to carry freight. Air cargo demand reached an all-time high in the third quarter of 2020, she said, so revenue from air cargo is filling some of the gap created by drops in passenger revenue. Airlines are also planning to play an important role in the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines around the world, she added. “So we’re seeing cargo as being one of the paths to recovery.”
Concerning what airlines are doing to protect the health of passengers and crew, Garrow said that the best way to describe it was to detail her own experiences flying during the pandemic. She lives in Atlanta and flies mainly on Delta. When she gets to the airport—wearing her mask—she first goes through the security line operated by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). A new feature is that passengers in line walk through a maze of plexiglass that keeps them separated from other parts of the line. “The only time that I have to touch something,” she said, “is when I put my baggage on the security belt to go through, and even then, as soon as I’m through, there are disinfecting stations waiting for me,” or sometimes a Delta agent is there to squirt disinfectant on her hands before she heads to the gate. When she boards the aircraft, the Delta flight attendant hands her a disinfectant wipe that she can use to wipe down high-touch areas, but that may not actually be necessary because before the passengers boarded the plane, the airline has disinfected it using electrostatic sprayers and other disinfectants. On the plane, passengers are spread out—Delta keeps the middle seat empty—to minimize the chance of viral transmission. An attendant tosses bags to the passengers—in order to minimize contact—that contain snacks and bottled water.
The most amazing part of these flights, she said, is that when the flight is over and the plane arrives at the gate, the passengers are actually courteous. In the past, once the seat-belt light went off, passengers would jump up to try to get their bags. “Now the bell goes off and nobody moves,” she said. “Everyone is courteous. You wait for the person ahead of you to get the bag, disembark, to maintain social distancing.” And according to surveys, customer satisfaction is “through the roof.” Those passengers who are flying are having a very positive experience.
Beyond the financial and health challenges, airlines have had to deal with a number of other issues that have arisen during the pandemic. For instance, Garrow said, airlines have modified their crew staffing algorithms to avoid having pilots and crew members stay overnight in cities away from their home base, particularly in COVID-19 hotspots. She provided an example of the types of unexpected challenges that have popped up, describing an issue that airlines have faced in India. Typically, airlines hire local people driving cars or buses to take the flight crew to places away from the airport where they are staying. But many states in India had restrictions on travel, and “when the transport drivers were coming up to the state borders after they had dropped the crew off, the police basically didn’t believe that they were out there for legitimate reasons.” In some cases, the police beat the drivers for ignoring lockdown or impounded their cars. As a result, some of the drivers quit because they were afraid of conflict with police.
One lesson of this anecdote, Garrow said, is that the problems one faces in running an airline do not stop at the cabin or the airport. “It’s a door-to-door experience.”
Another challenge that airlines have been facing is the uncertainty caused by ever-changing travel restrictions. Quoting Robert Lange, the senior vice president of Airbus, she said that customer surveys have shown that the main reason people give now for not flying is not the health risk but rather the risk that they will arrive at a destination and be unable to leave because of some newly imposed travel restrictions.
On the other hand, the factors keeping people from flying are creating a pent-up demand so that once restrictions are lifted, many people will want to start traveling. It has already been seen in some parts of the world, with flights selling out within days. “People really want to travel,” she said, “particularly if they know they can get back and not get stuck.” One response to this is that airlines have been developing new forecasting tools that can predict demand and, in particular, model impact of travel restrictions on demands.
Another way that airlines have been responding to less predictable demand is to use airplanes that are in “active preservation mode”—that is, they are not scheduled for use because of the smaller number of flights being
offered, but they are kept ready to go. Then if there is more demand for a particular flight than expected, a large airplane can be swapped out for the smaller airplane that had been planned for that route.
Looking to the future, Garrow said that the changes airlines have made in response to the pandemic may end up permanently changing the industry. For example, airlines have been “grooming” their aircraft before each departure with electrostatic sprayers to clean them of any virus particles. This increases the “turn time” at the gate—the amount of time between arrival and departure—which decreases the amount of time an aircraft can be flown in a given day. That has not been a problem during the pandemic because airlines have been flying far below their capacities, but it will become a problem as air travel gets back to normal. “So airlines are starting to think about how to incorporate these grooming procedures in a more efficient way or whether or not they really need to do them between every flight,” she said.
A second issue is that airlines have given customers more flexibility with their tickets in recognition of the uncertainties surrounding travel. “Before,” Garrow said, “I knew where my demand was coming in. Now I may get a lot of cancellations at the last minute. I may not see demand until the week before departure. So it’s really hard for airlines to know where to go to put their aircraft out for the schedule.”
Garrow closed with two thoughts. First, she quoted Dennis Buitendijy at Qatar Airlines as commenting, in essence, You shouldn’t waste a good crisis, and COVID can be a real catalyst for change. “We are seeing changes in R&D priorities, we’re seeing a continued focus on protecting passengers and crew, and it really is a very exciting time to be in aviation and to tackle a lot of the problems going on.” Second, she said that there is some frustration on the part of airlines in response to the ever-changing travel restrictions and the effect of that on airline demand and operations. “You can imagine that if I can fly into a country one day and not the next, if suddenly there is a quarantine in place and then not, that is having a lot of impact on demand and operations for the airlines.” Thus, she said, to the extent it would be possible to come up with a more global approach to COVID-related travel restrictions, it would help the airline industry a lot.
Delta’s Approach to COVID-19
As an illustration of the sorts of things that an airline can do—and that some already have done—to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, Garrison described how his company, Delta Airlines, has responded over the past year. He began by saying that the pandemic has been challenging and humbling for Delta and other airlines, but, he added, the growth and learning that accompanied the airlines’ response has been an amazing experience.
Garrison focused the first part of his presentation on what Delta has done to increase safety for its customers. After that, he discussed Delta’s efforts to protect its employees. He ended with a brief look to the future for Delta and the airline industry.
Delta, as well as many other U.S. airlines, uses a risk-based safety system developed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to assess risk and determine the best ways to mitigate whatever risks they identify, Garrison said. In particular, Delta’s safety management system (SMS) played a major role in the company’s response to the pandemic.
However, the company’s in-house safety expertise was not enough, he added. “We quickly realized that we were in over our heads when it came to understanding exactly how we were going to manage ourselves and our company through this.” So Delta developed a number of relationships with other entities. It worked, for example, with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) such as Boeing and Airbus on such things as studies of air flow in airplane cabins. Delta’s medical advisory board, which Garrison chairs, partners with the Mayo Clinic, based out of Rochester, Minnesota, and the airline also partnered with Emory University’s medical school and hospital which, like Delta, are based in Atlanta. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), also in Atlanta, cooperated closely with it as well, he noted. Finally, the airline worked with various industry committees, such as Airlines for America, on understanding and influencing government policies that would affect the air travel industry.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Delta has taken part in a number of initiatives designed to improve safety in air travel, Garrison said. Its first focus was on cleaning its aircraft thoroughly. The company established dedicated cleaning teams that cleaned aircraft with electrostatic sprayers (e-sprayers) on each “turn,” the period between arrival at and departure from an airport gate. Delta is continuing to e-spray on every aircraft on every turn,
he said, and it is constantly looking for new technologies that can minimize fomite transmission, the transmission of the virus via contaminated surfaces. One challenge, Garrison said, will be that as the numbers of flights increase, the turn times will become shorter—they are now as long as he has ever seen in his 30-year career—and this will make it difficult, if not impossible, to thoroughly clean each plane at each turn. Thus Delta is looking for some technology that will provide longer-lasting protections and will not have to be applied at each turn.
The company also assesses the health of those people, both passengers and crew, who travel on its planes. Delta is continuing to carry out temperature screenings, for example. There are actually very few people who present with temperatures too high to get on the plane, he said, but the temperature checks serve as an added layer of protection.
Delta also has a mandatory mask program. “We’re really proud of that program,” Garrison said. “and we feel like we were an industry leader.” The program was instituted based on input from colleagues at Emory and the Mayo Clinic, he said, and Delta remains diligent in enforcing it.
One policy, Garrison said, that set his company apart from most other airlines has been its policy to keep middle seats empty when there are more than two seated together in a row. “We’re getting resounding positive feedback from our customers on the level of comfort that it gives them when they travel on Delta,” he continued, “so we have announced that we will maintain that empty seat through the end of March.” Whether it will be continued past that point is still being determined. “We’re in the process of assessing and reevaluating that using our SMS and risk-based systems,” he said. There is still a lot of debate inside Delta about which direction to go, and the company is working with both internal and external scientific and medical experts to make that decision.
Delta is also a firm believer in testing programs, Garrison said. For instance, in December, Delta instituted a testing program for international flights from Atlanta or New York to Rome. Anyone on the plane was required to have taken a COVID-19 test with negative results in the 72 hours leading up to the flight, and then a rapid test was done just prior to departure to validate the earlier results. There were no cases of COVID-19 transmissions resulting from flights in that program. The biggest challenges of the program, he said, were associated with the logistics of getting customers tested, including validating that they had done the 72-hour test; only a very low percentage of customers failed that validation before departure. And the no-show rate was not significantly high, either. “We expect and hope that the international testing programs will continue to grow,” he said.
On inbound international flights, Delta is implementing the latest government mandate that requires the passengers to be tested and the airline to validate the testing. “That’s obviously a lot of heavy lifting by the Delta team to validate and ensure that we are compliant as we do U.S. inbound travel from all our international locations,” he said.
Turning to Delta’s programs to ensure its employees’ health, Garrison said that those employee programs followed a path that was very similar to those for passengers. All crew members get regular health checks, including digital checks with devices that the employees carry with them on the aircraft. Masks are required for all crew members while they are working as well, he said. Even in the cockpit, pilots are asked to keep their masks on unless they deem it unsafe or if they must take their masks off for some reason related to maintaining the safety of the aircraft.
Policies in Delta workplaces on the ground are very similar. The company has instituted social distancing, for example. The Delta headquarters and most of its offices are still at 20 to 30 percent occupancy. “We continue to evaluate where we need to be when it comes to our offices and what the timing will be,” he added. “As you can imagine, there’s a lot of change going on, so we have to understand that fully and see where we need to be when it comes to that.”
Delta also has a contact-tracing program and has applied it to all cases of employees with COVID-19. What they have learned over the past few months, he said, is that about 85 to 90 percent of those cases could be traced to external transmission—that is, community transmission. There has been no significant transmission of the virus inside the workplace. “We’re really proud of that,” he said, “and what we’ve had to do is take a more global and systematic approach to make sure our employees are not only staying safe at work, but they’re carrying that same behavior and those important practices at home.”
In addition to its safety protocols, Delta has worked to protect its employees from financial damages as well, Garrison said, including protecting the pay of employees who contract the virus. “We wanted to make sure that our employees felt protected financially if, in fact, they are diagnosed or have symptoms of COVID,” he said.
“Ultimately it’s great for our customers because we make sure that employees don’t feel obligated to come to work and . . . don’t create any more risk for our customers and our employees.” There are more than 1,000 Delta employees on that program today, he added, although he said he expects to see a steady reduction in that number as the number of COVID-19 cases continues to drop. The program has been a financial burden on Delta, he said, but it has played a big role in the company’s efforts to keep transmission of the virus at a minimum.
The company also has an employee testing program, with employees encouraged to get tested once a week. This is an aggressive goal, Garrison said, and the company is not quite there yet, but it is continuing to increase its capacity. It uses both at-home tests and in-workplace rapid tests. The results for the at-home tests come back in about 3 days, while the rapid tests produce results in 15 to 20 minutes. Delta is doing about 12,000 tests a week.
On the Monday after the workshop, Garrison said, Delta was to start a company vaccination program for all employees over 65. The plan was to use half of Terminal C at the Atlanta airport for employees who work at the airport and to use the museum in Delta’s corporate headquarters for corporate employees.
Concluding with a brief look at the future, Garrison said that Delta is keeping a close eye on the variants of the virus that are emerging in various places around the world. The company is continuing to evaluate the effectiveness of its protocols in light of those new strains. And, with the increasing vaccination of Americans and others around the world, he said, “we expect and are excited about the return of travel and hope that we start to see an increase in domestic travel very soon.”
Boeing’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
When Boeing saw the precipitous drop off in both domestic and international travel, Delaney said, he and his team considered what they could do to help. And while there are medical people, virologists, and epidemiologists who work for Boeing, it is basically an aerospace engineering company, and Delany has been its chief engineer, so they looked at it as an engineering challenge, thinking of COVID-19 as a threat to a plane and thinking about how to deal with that. And a typical engineering approach to a threat is to create independent layers of protection and redundancy.
The team decided on the following three layers of threat reduction: prevent the virus from reaching the plane, keep the airplane free of viruses, and minimize transmission of viruses on the plane. The first layer involved thinking about all the things that must happen before an infected person gets on a plane and finding ways to minimize the chance that this happens. Keeping the airplane free from viruses involved dealing with both the fomite and the aerosol risk. Third, minimizing transmission if an infected person made it onto the plane meant finding ways, such as masking and increased ventilation, to make it less likely any virus particles could be passed on.
They laid out the program to have three time horizons. In the near term, which was around March to June 2020, the goal was to respond to the immediate needs of the industry and reassure passengers and crew members. In the mid-term, they wanted to enhance, stabilize, and standardize guidance, recommendations, and solutions in order to provide a predictable travel experience. And in the long term, he said, the goal was to continue to improve the system. “So that was the way we approached it—aerospace principles and practices, redundancy, independent layers.”
The program developed risk reduction approaches in two areas, fomites and aerosols. Although today the aerosol risk is believed to be the dominant risk, at the time it was not clear which was most important, so they worked on both. In addressing the fomite risk, they developed a program with the airlines and with the industry, the Clean Airplane Program, which was modeled after a maintenance program for an airplane or an engine. It looked at the different surfaces in an airplane where the virus might land, and they looked at a variety of ways to kill the virus—from chemical disinfectants and ultraviolet (UV) light to ionization and thermal radiation. To test the efficacy of different techniques on different surfaces, they worked with Charles Gerba from the University of Arizona (see Chapter 3). They did some testing with a human-safe virus on a mockup of a Boeing 787 and then on an actual 737. Gerba helped them determine the efficacy of the various techniques.
The ultimate goal was to be able to tell airlines just how much they needed to do in terms of cleaning in order to make their planes safe. Early on, Delaney said, airlines were probably doing more than they needed to—it was overkill—and while that was okay in the early days of the pandemic, ultimately airlines will need to be more effi-
cient and turn around their planes as quickly as they can. That was the point of the Clean Airplane Program—to identify how much cleaning is enough but not too much.
The second thing the team did was to perform analyses using computational fluid dynamics to understand what happens with the viral particles when an infected person sitting on a plane coughs or sneezes. They performed the analyses in a 737 model and also on the company’s wide-body planes. What they found was that when an infected person on a 737 coughs, the person in the next seat is exposed to about as many particles as he or she would be if sitting in a conference room or an office when an infected person 7 feet away coughs, Delaney said. The combination of the airplane’s geometry and the powerful ventilation causes most of the viral particles to be sucked out of the plane before they come in contact with anyone else. In short, he said, the cabin of a Boeing or Airbus jet is “a better environment than any environment you’re going to be on ground, even with somebody sitting 17 inches away from you.”
In another project, the Boeing team would model the complete travel journey—from entering the departure airport to exiting the arrival airport. They are trying to evaluate the risk at various nodes—check in, screening by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), going to a restaurant, sitting at the gate, and so on—in order to understand exactly where the greatest risks are, to work on those to lower the overall risk for the entire journey. One thing the team found in talking with various airports is that, because the new risk-reduction procedures require spreading people out more than before, airports will probably not be able to hold more than 55 to 60 percent of 2019 passenger volume and still maintain those procedures.
Ultimately, Delaney said, any effective solution to dealing with COVID-19 will have to be a system solution, and he offered as the example the suggestion that people not be allowed to use carry-on baggage because it delays how fast people get on and off a plane. Doing that, however, would cause more people to line up to check their backs and more people to line up at baggage claim, so trying make improvements in one area causes issues in two others, Delaney said. “So it’s a complete system solution you have to think about.”
One thing that many people do not realize, Delaney said, is that airports are actually much safer buildings than, say, office buildings. Most office buildings have about two air changes an hour and filter with a MERV rating of 8. In both the United States and globally, airports change their air 6 to 10 times an hour, and U.S. code requires that airport air filtration must be at least MERV 13, which is the first antiviral level of filtration. Furthermore, airplane HEPA filters are typically MERV 17–21, so they do an even better job of cleaning the air.
Airbus’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
The pandemic started out as a sanitary crisis and then became a financial crisis, Roemelt said, but it also created a trust crisis in which people did not trust that it was safe to travel on commercial airlines. Thus Airbus created a program called Keep Trust in Air Travel to help airlines regain and maintain the trust of the people who fly commercially.
How could such trust be regained? Because Airbus is an engineering company, Roemelt said, “We need to talk with facts, with scientific proof.” So it set out to find ways to block viral transmission on aircraft through the air and surfaces and to prevent the virus from getting on the plane in the first place. It did this in collaboration with other OEMs through the International Coordinating Council of the Aerospace Industries Association. And Airbus used its customer experience teams, which usually do such things as present and explain new cabin layouts to its airline customers, to share information about Airbus’s pandemic efforts and also to listen to its customer’s pandemic-related problems.
As an aircraft manufacturer, Airbus’s main focus in the Keep Trust in Air Travel program was the aircraft, with initiatives aimed at such things as disinfection and airflow, but the company realized that regaining trust also involved other aspects of air travel, such as the airport, the people (not just passengers and flight crews but airport employees and others), and even the broader society. But Airbus’s major strengths are engineering-related, he said, and so most of the company’s response to the pandemic involved the engineering of ways to make air travel safer.
As an example, Roemelt described Airbus’s work on ways to clean the cabin in order to minimize the risk of viral transmission. The company’s researchers chose five disinfectant methods that have been shown to have
some effect on the virus: fogging and spraying, thermal methods, hydrogen peroxide, UV light, and “apply and wipe off.” This last method, which involves applying disinfectant and wiping it clean with a towel, is the standard method used on airplanes but which has been shown to be very efficient. They then assessed each of those five methods in four areas: efficacy against the virus; material properties (e.g., what effect does it have on the color or flammability of a material in the cabin?); how much time and effort is required; and effects on the health and safety of workers, crew, and passengers. After some initial studies, the researchers carried out studies in a mock-up of an aircraft cabin located in Hamburg, Germany.
Working with the Fraunhofer Institute, the researchers applied a surrogate virus in the mock-up and then tested the various disinfectant methods to see how well they removed the virus from surfaces, particularly those surfaces most likely to be touched by passengers and crew. Depending on the method used, Roemelt said, they found efficacy in removing the virus of 99 to 99.99 percent. With the resulting information on efficacy, time requirements, material effects, and safety, he said, Airbus can offer its customers disinfectant methods that are tailored to their particular operational needs.
Moving to Airbus’s efforts on cabin ventilation, Roemelt said that the cabins of aircraft made by Airbus and other major manufacturers provide clean air by design. In particular, the cabin in an Airbus aircraft has a constant injection of fresh air, and the air is fully renewed every 2 to 3 minutes. The air is pushed through hospital-grade HEPA filters that remove more than 99.9 percent of particles in the air. Furthermore, top-to-bottom air flows limit mixing between rows, and the backs of seats act as additional barriers to mixing.
To understand the risk of viral transmission in an aircraft cabin with an infected person, Airbus engineers worked with a computational fluid dynamics model of air flow within a cabin. They modeled the air flow in a portion of a cabin that included the row in which an infected person sat as well as two rows in front and two rows in back. It was an extremely detailed simulation, he said, involving 50 million data and 1,000 successive calculations to represent just one second of air flow. The question posed was this, If an infected person coughs and expels 10,000 droplets and aerosol particles—a number drawn from the literature—how many of those will reach a person sitting in the next seat? The calculations assumed that both people are wearing masks. If so, the model predicted that the combination of the masks, gravity, and air flow would reduce those 10,000 droplets and aerosols to just 5 that reach the other person. In short, Roemelt said, the cabin’s air flow combined with masks and the effect of gravity create a safe environment.
Finally, Roemelt spoke about Airbus efforts to model approaches to make air travel safer that extend beyond the aircraft. “We are not necessarily medical experts,” he said, “but we are experts in how to simulate the risk in flight safety.” In particular, Airbus has developed various models for how to rate a risk and how to prevent a risk, and the company has combined this knowledge with inputs from medical experts to create an end-to-end risk assessment that covers a passenger’s entire journey. At each step on that journey the model examines the effects of, say, testing or quarantine on the risk. That assessment model is available from Airbus, he said, for anyone who is interested in modeling the effects of different measures. While it is still being honed, the first results of the simulations have been very promising, he said. It shows “what can be done if you release the engineering power of an engineering company.”
AIRPORTS’ RESPONSE TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Two speakers described how airports responded to the pandemic. Ivan Bassato, the executive vice president of operations at Aeroporti di Roma, the company that manages the two airports in Rome, Italy, focused on how the pandemic affected those airports and their response. And Cristian Panait, a medical expert with the aircrew and medical department with the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), gave a broader look at how European airports dealt with the pandemic.
The Situation in Rome
The larger of the two airports operated by Aeroporti di Roma, Rome Fiumicino, is Italy’s major airport, with about 100 airlines connecting Rome with more than 200 destinations. It is a major hub airport in Europe, Bassato
said, with flights to more than 50 long-haul destinations, including 12 in China. It has about two dozen daily departures serving the U.S. market. It was named the best airport in Europe in 2018, 2019, and 2020.
Italy was the first country in Western Europe to experience the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bassato noted. The first case was transmitted locally in mid- to late February 2020, and the country was under a national lockdown from March 9 to May 4. After that, the lockdown was gradually lifted, but mask mandates and social distancing remained in place. A second wave arrived in October and peaked in November.
As with the rest of the world, Bassato said, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on airport operations in Rome was huge. The number of passengers using the Fiumicino international airport dropped from 43.5 million in 2019 to just 9.8 million in 2020—a total that had not been seen since the 1960s, the first era after the construction of the airport. There had been a mild recovery in the number of passengers over the summer, but the second wave that hit Europe and much of the rest of the world in the fall of 2020 pushed those numbers back down again, and the number of passengers using the airport in January 2021 was down 89 percent from a year earlier.
Aeroporti di Roma’s strategy for responding to the pandemic is built on three pillars, Bassato said. First, as a pre-requisite to restoring air connectivity, it is essential to have biosafe airports and air travel. Second is the creation of clean corridors where all passengers are tested before departure as a safer alternative to “trust-based quarantines.” And the third is the extensive digitalization of the protocols and processes that have been put in place.
Going into more detail on each of these three pillars, Bassato first described what Aeroporti di Roma did to ensure a biosafe airport. It begins with strict implementation of the new COVID-19 regulations promulgated by various agencies and organizations. For Roma airport authority, this includes the Italian government’s COVID laws, the European Aviation Health Safety Protocol, and the Italian Civil Aviation Authority’s guidelines for operators. In addition to that, Aeroporti di Roma looked to stimulate innovation and create best practices that respond to the COVID-19 challenge. Doing so, Bassato said, meant reengineering all of the airport processes to meet health safety requirements, setting up a standing “COVID innovation lab” for quick adoption of new technologies being made available by industry, continuous communication with the public, and using models of the airport to make sure any new set-ups maintained health safety. In addition, the new airport set-up was subjected to third-party certification.
In practice, all of these changes resulted in an airport that looked very different from a year earlier, Bassato said. Dozens and dozens of changes were made, including a collection of ubiquitous light-blue signs that instruct those in the airport on the new procedures they need to follow. There are social distancing and mask requirements, more than 300 gel dispensers scattered around the airport, UV light disinfection of security trays and escalators, terminal entry restrictions, the chemical disinfection of hold baggage, touchless self-boarding, sanitization booths, sanitizing robots, masks in vending machines, and much more.
According to surveys, passengers passing through the airport are satisfied with the steps the airport has taken, with 99.6 percent of them saying they felt safe at the airport. The passengers have also mostly abided by the safety regulations, with 98.1 percent of them wearing masks correctly and only 1.9 percent wearing them incorrectly, and 90.1 percent of them keeping a social distance of 1.5 meters (with Italian law recommending 1.0 meters).
Moving to the idea of clean corridors, the second pillar, Bassato said that experience has shown that it is not sufficient to rely on airport passengers self-quarantine. Some infected people will still get on airplanes and put others at risk. So in 2021, many European Union countries began to institute pre-departure testing, but not in a coordinated manner; some countries requested molecular or antigenic tests, some only molecular tests, some both molecular and antigenic tests, and so on.
In light of this, Aeroporto di Roma has proposed the establishment of “clean corridors” for air travel. To carry this out, all passengers from certain critical areas would need to have a negative test before boarding an aircraft; what constitutes a “critical area” would be based on certain predetermined criteria or in response to a contingent situation, such as the emergence of new variants in an area. In particular, the idea of clean corridors is to make sure that everyone who boards an aircraft is healthy, which would then obviate the need to test passengers when they deplane at their destinations, so that healthy people can travel unimpeded.
Aeroporti di Roma has taken several steps to lay the groundwork for such clean corridors, Bassato said. The Fiumicino airport now has three testing facilities within the airport that offer rapid antigen detection tests to arriving passengers, with a capacity of 5,400 passenger tests a day. There is also a major drive-through testing facility in the airport’s long-term parking lot. More to the point, there was a pilot program that ended January 31, 2021, that was
set up to demonstrate the idea of a clean corridor. Working with Alitalia, Aeroporto di Roma set up COVID-tested flights on the Rome-to-Milan shuttle. Every passenger had to either take a rapid antigen test at the airport or show a medical certificate with a negative COVID test (molecular or antigenic) performed within 72 hours of the flight. The purpose was to demonstrate the operational viability and overall effectiveness of the clean corridors proposal.
As a further test of the concept, there have been clean corridor flights into the Rome airport from New York City (via Alitalia) and from Atlanta (via Delta). The passengers must have had a negative COVID test within 48 hours of boarding and take a rapid antigenic test upon arrival in Italy, but once in Italy they are not subject to the usual quarantine but are free to move around.
The pre-flight testing was very effective in preventing infected passengers from boarding the flights from the United States to Italy, Bassato said. Out of 3,867 arriving passengers, 18 tested positive with the rapid antigen test upon arrival, but only 5 of those had the infection confirmed by PCR, or molecular, testing. Thus only 0.13 percent of the passengers on the flight were potential sources of infection. Surveys found that 90 percent of the passengers would recommend flying on these COVID-tested flights, and the number of passengers flying on these routes increased significantly after the new COVID-tested flights were offered.
The World Tourism Organization of the United Nations has endorsed this pilot project, Bassato said, regarding it as the most viable strategy to restart tourism around the world.
Concluding with the third pillar of the strategy, Bassato spoke briefly about the digitalization of health protocols as a way to move the clean corridors strategy forward. Since January the Aeroporti di Roma has been carrying out a trial study of an “AOK Pass” app, which serves as a digital health pass. In particular, passengers on the Rome-to-New York route can get a “digital negativity certificate” by taking a rapid antigen test at the airport. This certificate is carried with the AOK Pass app and used to speed up boarding and other processes associated with a passenger’s COVID status.
With these three pillars, Bassato said, the hope is that air travel that is both safe and convenient can be reestablished in the near future.
The Airport Response in Europe
Panait began by explaining that EASA has a function in Europe much like that of the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States, that is, it is the European regulator for aviation safety. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the main document EASA published is COVID-19 Aviation Health Safety Protocol, which provides guidelines for the management of airline passengers in crew relative to the pandemic.
A major purpose of the document was to create a harmonized approach to the pandemic in the aviation industry across the states of the European Union. “As you know,” he commented, “it is rather difficult for an airplane that takes off from one country and lands in another one and may be registered in a third country to comply with sets of rules that are not harmonized among themselves.”
The document was structured to cover the entire travel experience, Panait said. It began with measures that should be followed at all times, moved to information that should be provided to the passengers and crew before arriving at the airport, then went into measures at the airport, on board the aircraft, and upon arrival. Among the measures that applied at all times, for instance, were those applying to hand hygiene, cough etiquette, and face masks; cleaning and disinfection; protection and screens; distancing; and the management of unruly passengers. One of the specific issues that led to some unruly passengers, he noted, was the institution of mask requirements.
The recommendations for before arriving at the airport included completing a statement of health (for passengers), not traveling if symptoms are present, having medical face masks and sanitary gel, and taking advantage of advanced check-in. The in-airport recommendations included allowing only passengers in the airport, minimizing carry-on luggage, maintaining physical distance and passenger flows, increasing ventilation, and thermal screening. And the measures upon arrival dealt with disembarking, personal hygiene, thermal screening, baggage claim, and onward travel.
These measures were put in place with recommendations on how best to implement them, Panait said, the airport and aircraft operators were given a certain amount of flexibility in implementation because of differences across European airports and aircraft.
To learn what worked well and what did not in the implementation of these guidelines, EASA set up an implementation monitoring system. That system is getting reports back from airports and airlines that represent almost 50 percent of European air traffic.
Panait then reported some of what has been learned from the monitoring. A relatively small percentage of passengers—generally somewhere between 10 and 30 per 100,000 departing passengers, depending on the week—must go through a secondary assessment because the health screening indicated that they were symptomatic (fever, cough, etc.) or that they had come in contact with a sick person. At the arrival airport, a larger percentage of passengers are given further assessment after the initial assessment, but only a very small number of arriving passengers are denied entry or put into quarantine because of a health assessment.
The monitoring also shows a very low rate of COVID infection among airport personnel—indeed, generally less than a tenth of the rate among the general European population.
Concerning the implementation of EASA’s recommendations on maintaining clean air and surfaces, Panait said that many of the recommendations are being carried out by almost all of the reporting airports, including the cleaning and disinfection of recently touched surfaces and working to maintain proper air ventilation, such as by introducing fresh air. Fewer airports were performing air quality checks, and only 30 percent had begun using UV-C filters.
For the recommendations about discouraging symptomatic people from traveling, different airports and different airlines chose to carry out different strategies. Both the airports and the airlines provide information about COVID policies to passengers, but they differ in how they provide the information—at the check-in counter or elsewhere in the airport, on the ticket, audio reminders, social media messages, and so on. Nearly two-thirds of airports reported using thermal screening, but only 40 percent had passengers fill out a health questionnaire, and just 14 percent were testing passengers.
Airports were carrying out many of the recommended physical distancing measures, although there were some places where distancing was difficult to achieve, such as in security checkpoints and on buses and air bridges. By contrast, the feedback from airlines indicated that less was being done to ensure physical distancing. In particular, no airlines reported keeping some seats on their aircraft empty, and few had done anything to limit time on buses and air bridges.
Concerning masks and ventilation, airlines have done a very good job of making masks available for passengers, with 81 percent having them available for free and another 6 percent having them available for purchase. However, there are relatively few places in the airports themselves where masks are available.
Summing up the findings, Panait said that the main issues the monitoring has found related to physical distancing in airports and the wearing of medical masks on board aircraft. Some of the European member states allow cloth masks or face coverings outside of the airport, so it can be difficult to convince passengers that on board an aircraft they need a medical facemask. And there are various areas in which there is room for improvement, he said, such as processing times at boarding and baggage claim, the availability of face masks in the airport, and allocating seats to enhance physical distancing, such as keeping certain seats unoccupied.
Generally speaking, he said, the recommended measures seem to be working, and the public health authorities in Europe have indicated that the implementation is appropriate in most of the cases. When the recommendations are fully implemented, he said, the aviation environment can be considered safer than the general society in terms of risks of COVID transmission.
With the high levels of COVID cases in Europe at present and the appearance of new strains of the vaccine, the likelihood of having an asymptomatic passenger on board any given flight is likely increasing. Thus EASA is recommending that airports and airlines keep their guard up and continue implementing the recommendations as much as possible
