Evaluating Classical Airplane Boarding Methods for Passenger Health during Normal Times

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced changes in the entire aviation industry, including adjustments by airlines to keep the middle seats of airplanes empty to reduce the risk of disease spread. In this context, the scientific literature has introduced new metrics related to passengers’ health when comparing airplane boarding methods in addition to the previous objective of minimizing boarding time. As the pandemic concludes and the aviation industry returns to the pre-pandemic situation, we leverage what we learned during the pandemic to reduce the health risk to passengers when they are not social distancing. In this paper, we examine the performance of classical airplane boarding methods in normal times but while considering the health metrics established during the pandemic and new metrics related to passenger health in the absence of social distancing. In addition to being helpful in normal times, the analysis may be particularly helpful in situations when people think everything is normal but an epidemic has begun prior to being acknowledged by the medical scientific community. The reverse pyramid boarding method provides favorable values for most health metrics in this context while also minimizing the time to complete boarding of the airplane.

Health risks of airplane boarding methods with apron buses when some passengers disregard safe social distancing

“…Three of the five metrics related to passenger health are: aisle seat risk, window seat risk, the total number of seat interferences [ 3 , 5 , 41 ]. The other two health metrics—aisle standing risk and the individual boarding time—were created to capture health risks when there is an endemic (or an major health situation) that is unbeknownst to the traveling public and thus no passengers practice aisle social distancing [ 56 ].…”

Exploring the Applications of Agent-Based Modeling in Transportation

“…Within the domain of air transportation, the application of ABMs has predominantly centered around the following focal points of research: study of the airport terminal operations [5], estimating occupant density in airports [6], simulating the passenger flow in airport terminals [7], improving the airplane boarding process [8], improving passenger service time [9], assessing airport terminal resilience [10], analyzing the security and efficiency in airport terminals [11]. Among the delineated sub-areas within air transportation, the domain of airplane boarding has witnessed a pronounced surge in applications utilizing agent-based modeling [12].…”

“…Among the delineated sub-areas within air transportation, the domain of airplane boarding has witnessed a pronounced surge in applications utilizing agent-based modeling [12]. Issues arise such as evaluating the efficiency and sustainability of airplane boarding strategies, simulating airplane boarding through the use of apron buses and the two doors of the airplane, testing classical and new methods for airplane boarding within various conditions, proposing new methods for accelerating the boarding process, analyzing the efficiency of the boarding methods from the perspective of the passenger health [8,13,14].…”