FAA Office of Aerospace Medicine 
Civil Aerospace Medical Institute 

Report No: DOT/FAA/AM-23/28

Title and Subtitle:Communicable Disease Transmission in Air Travel: Human Behavior – Phase 1 Report

Report Date: September 25, 2023

Authors:Shelley Roberts,² Paul Lebbin,² Steve Gwynne,¹ Russ Thomas,² Ryszard Dabkowski,² Andrew Law,² Sebastian Ghinet,² Steve Hunt,¹ Ailsa HamiltonSmith,¹ Hui Xie,¹ Charly Tenon Kone,² Dana Sayed Ahmed,² and Anant Grewal², Max Kinateder² and Maxine Berthiaume<sup>2

1</sup>GHD, Inc., ²National Research Council Canada

Abstract: AbstractThe Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has initiated work to develop a preparedness plan for communicable disease in air travel. The FAA’s approach to the planning effort is to use its existing Safety Risk Management (SRM) process, as documented in FAA Order 8040.4, to quantify baseline risk, identify risk controls and quantify residual risk. The FAA will then use the SRM outputs as inputs to the preparedness planning activity, thereby making the later risk-based and data-driven. The FAA established a SRM team in February 2022, which quickly identified a lack of sufficient data and suitable models to proceed through the SRM process. In response, the SRM team commissioned a risk estimation Modeling, Simulation, and Analysis (MS&A) working group to close this gap. The MS&A working group conducted an international workshop in August 2022, and formulated a 24-month research program to develop an open source, validated risk estimation tool with associated data for a narrow body, single aisle passenger transport aircraft use case. The working group’s objective is to transition its work products for use by the SRM team, government preparedness planners, and those in industry conducting safety risk assessments as part of airline safety management systems. The research program is being conducted in two phases. The first phase (6 months), completed in August 2023, delivered a comprehensive data acquisition plan and methodology based on the risk estimation model architecture proposed by FAA and industry collaborators. The second phase (18 months) will execute the data acquisition plan in airports, on operational aircraft, and in the National Research Council of Canada’s Centre for Air Travel Research and provide the data for model development. Data collected in Phase 2 will also be used to support model validation. This report documents the results of the Phase 1 work developing the data acquisition plan and methodology for the human behavioral elements of the modeling and simulation task.

Key Words: Aviation medicine, modeling and simulation, preparedness, public health, safety risk management,

No. of Pages: 216