Commercial airline passengers' willingness to fly with COVID-19 safety measures

Abstract

In the commercial aviation industry, safety is always a primary concern, with a central focus on the well?being of passengers and crew members. Given the significance of safety, the COVID?19 pandemic has resulted in drastic changes to the way commercial airlines operate. The airline industry has had to adopt precautions to help ensure safety by minimizing the risk of transmission for both passengers and airline employees during air travel. We examined passengers' willingness to fly with various commercial airline COVID-19 safety precaution scenarios: control (none), face coverings (masks), negative PCR test, boarding and deplaning five rows at a time, and paired combinations of these precautions. The within-subject design assessed Willingness to Fly (Rice et al., 2015, 2020) for all scenarios in random order. Participants were recruited from the US Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) user population. Willingness to fly was positive for all scenarios (N= 202). The control scenario, with no precautions listed, had the lowest willingness to fly (0.69); Scenario 3, negative PCR test required, had the highest willingness to fly (0.81). However, contrary to expectations, there was no statistically significant difference in willingness to fly between the scenarios. These results suggest that participants are willing to fly regardless of the precautions, meaning that air travelers are still willing to fly under the commonly used pandemic precautions or without.