Overview of Safety Measures at Selected Airports during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The year 2020 was very challenging for the whole world, given the outbreak of the ongoing coronavirus-related pandemic, and was marked in particular by overcoming new hitherto unknown obstacles. For air transport, in particular, airlines stopped flying altogether and were forced to ground hundreds of planes worldwide involuntarily. Airports had to close their terminals for a long time, wholly suspend operations, and its resumption required significant organizational changes. This article summarizes the measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic adopted by airports to minimize the risk of spreading the disease. The article focuses on countermeasures and their implementation at selected airports in a specific time frame and airports’ behavior during a pandemic which varies depending on country and time of the year. The results demonstrated that steps being taken at airports include the use of face coverings or masks, social distance, enhanced cleaning and disinfection, or temperature checks and/or symptoms (fever, loss of smell, chills, cough, shortness of breath), RT-PCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction) screening and data collection with health declaration. These measures have now become an essential standard for the operation of airports and can, therefore, be used to assess the level of airport safety achieved. In the final phase, the article evaluates the level of achieved airport safety based on the proposed scoring method.