From Bad to Worse: Airline Boarding Changes in Response to COVID-19

TL;DR

This study uses simulations to analyze how COVID-19 related airline boarding changes impact infection risk, finding that back-to-front boarding increases exposure compared to other methods, and recommends reverting to previous or random boarding processes.

Contribution

The paper provides a comparative analysis of infection risks associated with different airline boarding processes during COVID-19 using pedestrian dynamics simulations.

Findings

Back-to-front boarding doubles infection exposure compared to random boarding.

Back-to-front boarding increases exposure by 50% over pre-COVID boarding.

Keeping middle seats empty reduces exposure significantly.

Abstract

Airlines have introduced a back-to-front boarding process in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is motivated by the desire to reduce passengers' likelihood of passing close to seated passengers when they take their seats. However, our prior work on the risk of Ebola spread in airplanes suggested that the driving force for increased exposure to infection transmission risk is the clustering of passengers while waiting for others to stow their luggage and take their seats. In this work, we examine whether the new boarding processes lead to increased or decreased risk of infection spread. We also study the reasons behind the risk differences associated with different boarding processes. We accomplish this by simulating the new boarding processes using pedestrian dynamics and compare them against alternatives. Our results show that back-to-front boarding roughly doubles the infection exposure compared with random boarding. It also increases exposure by around 50% compared to a typical boarding process prior to the outbreak of COVID-19. While keeping middle seats empty yields a substantial reduction in exposure, our results show that the different boarding processes have similar relative strengths in this case as with middle seats occupied. We show that the increased exposure arises from the proximity between passengers moving in the aisle and while seated. Our results suggest that airlines either revert to their earlier boarding process or adopt the better random process.