Aviation has always had a strong safety focus, with more than a century of commercial flight demonstrated to be among the safest ways to travel. Yet, consciously and unconsciously, the industry has very rarely needed to communicate the details of how it is so safe to outside stakeholders. In the COVID-19 crisis, though, it’s absolutely critical not just to be doing safety — but to be talking about it too.
It’s safe to say that the science on in-cabin spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is still very much out. This is unsurprising: good science takes time, it takes independent peer review, and it takes external scrutiny. Some early, pre-review papers (mostly those funded by the aviation industry) suggest that spread is low. Others (mostly funded in other ways) highlight a more complicated picture. Reality may well be somewhere in the middle.
And most of the arguments around whether flying is safe focus entirely inside the aircraft cabin and do not adequately examine the full passenger journey — transport to the airport, pre-security, security, departures, pre-arrivals, arrival formalities if needed, baggage claim, and transport from the airport.
Fewer still contemplate what people do at their destination, whether for leisure, business or to visit friends and relations. Even fewer yet consider the wider question of whether, from the perspective of reducing infections, it is sensible to move people between regions during a pandemic.
During the pandemic, government directives and recommendations for air travel have varied from full laissez-faire to full lockdown and everything in between. Some have encouraged domestic or regional tourism, especially during warmer summer months, while others have encouraged only essential travel, and yet others none at all. The question of whether these were wise moves from a public health perspective has yet to be answered, but the growing number and intensity of European lockdowns is not the best of signs in this regard.
So given all that, what can we do to keep passengers safe?
Aboard the aircraft, cabin safety is being examined anew in the COVID context, and every airline has changed its procedures and protocols, often at speed and with an impressive amount of coordination, best-practice sharing, and regulator engagement. ICAO’s CART standards are one example of this work.
Throughout the ten sections of CART, it’s clear that digital implementation and collaboration are key parts of effective action towards meeting and exceeding these safety standards. It’s not just communicating reassuringly with passengers via apps, it’s sharing thought leadership across levels of the business (and through external stakeholders and service providers), it’s formalising and developing the lines of communication, collaborating across airlines and aviation stakeholders to share best practices and lessons learned around implementations, and acknowledging the interdependencies within the standard.
It’s also acknowledging the interdependencies of the industry outside the standard: if some airlines are clearly demonstrating that they are doing this well, a halo effect can benefit the wider industry. On the other side of the coin, however, is a sort of “forked tongue effect” from airlines that are not taking matters seriously, are failing to read the room and are publicly lobbying against public health measures. This will impact wider demand and recovery for all operators, and collaboration is therefore critical.
Aviation also needs truly independent, transparent and verifiable certification programmes, whose funding model is clear and free of any whiff of pay-to-play or the industry marking its own homework. Can we look, perhaps, to tools like corporate diversity benchmarking programmes, which are traditionally independent and may offer best practice from which aviation can learn?
In-cabin technological changes are constrained by these contexts, and indeed by the physical form of the cabin, which has largely remained unchanged. Nearly a year into the crisis, while the way onboard service is organised and delivered has changed dramatically — from boarding/deboarding processes through boxed meals to cabin crew in PPE — there has been little fundamental change to the hard product in aircraft.
At the beginning of COVID-19’s impact on aviation, many aviation suppliers started their most out-of-the-box, bluest-sky thinking ever. From rearranging seats in forwards-backwards layouts, to adding dividers between seats — whether permanent, semi-permanent or carry-on-board — a wide variety of options have been on offer throughout the northern hemisphere spring and summer, and now into the autumn.
But there have been few if any changes to the LOPA (layout of passenger accommodations) diagrams across the world’s fleet. Additions of hand sanitiser stations, disposable mask dispensers and similar hygiene measures have, for the most part, been the limit of the physical changes inside the aircraft.
Beyond that, though, the scope for innovation in commercial aviation has never been so wide.
Innovating in a highly regulated environment is a massive — but satisfying — challenge
Developments inside the aircraft will inherently be slower than those at the airport — turning touchscreen kiosks touchless through the use of mobile phone integration and software revisions, for example — but is likely to follow on from these changes.
Mobile changes are already happening thanks to the ease of rolling out update to airline app and messaging: changes to boarding notifications on some airlines now include a line about cleaning and hygiene protocols having been completed before their version of “your aircraft is ready for boarding”.
Cabin procedures, too, have changed, although there is substantial difference between airlines. That includes those that blocked middle seats, any adjacent seats, or no seats at all, and those that took one or more of those tacks and later stopped doing so.
There is also a fair amount of variance in how airlines’ service onboard has changed in order to reduce passenger-crew contact, and to minimise cross-infection risk. Some airlines like Qatar Airways and AirAsia have issued full head-to-toe disposable personal protective suits, gloves, visors and masks, while others have gone mask-only, with most somewhere in the middle.
At turnaround, airlines have also implemented practical changes like electrostatic fogging, increased wipedowns and longer turns, while new pieces of equipment like the Honeywell UV Cabin System (formerly known as the Germfalcon, essentially a catering trolley-sized piece of equipment with UV-C sterilising arms that extend across the cabin to disinfect) are being tested and offered for sale.
And invisible innovations are coming fast: implementing technology like antimicrobial materials and coatings, accelerating the rollout of zero-touch technology to what are today high-touch spaces like lavatories, and intensive research into the fluid dynamics of airflow within cabins.
There are, of course, wider safety questions driven by COVID-19 and its effects: loss of experience and currency for flight and cabin crews, the complexities of returning the world’s airline fleet to service, wildlife pattern changes at quieter airports, and many more.
Yet it’s clear that, for aviation to innovate its way out of the COVID-19 crisis as it evolves from public health pandemic to the greatest economic crisis in history, working together will be needed more than ever before.
Join the conversation
We’re talking about this in in our industry challenges area, let us know what you think – What can we do to keep passengers safe in a post-COVID world?
by John Walton, aviation journalist
10-Dec-2020
;
