Boarding Assessment and COVID-19 Considerations for the AVACON Aircraft Cabin Concepts

In the German LuFo research project AVACON, the project partners jointly developed a mid-range aircraft concept for the year 2028 with an over-wing engine configuration. With every new iteration of the initial concept, an adapted cabin concept was derived. This paper introduces the different cabin concept derivatives and assesses them regarding their boarding performance. The assessment is performed using the PAXelerate open-source boarding simulation framework. The results for a random boarding simulation show a boarding time reduction potential of 3.4 percent for the adapted cabin layouts of the iterated cabin design. The COVID-19 crisis has forced severe limitations on the international transportation market and has put a focus on the infection risk within the aircraft cabin. Thus, this paper introduces as a second aspect a new methodology that enables PAXelerate to assess the individual COVID-19 exposure risk of passengers during the boarding process. The basic model enhancement consists of the tracking of all passenger movements throughout the cabin, the determination of the proximity to other passengers as well as the monitoring of the duration of the individual contacts. This approach is similar to the frameworks introduced by Apple and Google for contact tracing on smart phones. The results highlight the overall risk for rear-to-front and front-to-rear boarding scenarios, considering the overall number of contacts as well as the proximity and duration of individual passenger contacts. Boarding scenarios such as window-to-aisle, random or the so-called Steffen procedure seem beneficial. The removal of cabin luggage has the largest effect on exposure risk mitigation. This highlights potential pathways for a future safe travel scenario with a minimized exposure risk for all passengers.