The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting aviation in many ways, causing unanticipated in-flight issues as well as problems for aviation workers on the ground.
“Many COVID-19−induced changes are predictable,” the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) said in the June 2020 issue of its Callback newsletter. “Contamination and disinfecting problems, scarcity of supplies, the lack of relevant procedures and other difficulties posed by social distancing appear obvious. Not so evident are complications rooted in the obvious but discovered only as one problem begets another.”1
In the newsletter, ASRS, a confidential incident-reporting system, cited “unanticipated side effects of operating equipment in an unfamiliar manner as the result of an individual or industry response to combat the virus.”
ASRS said that the decline in air traffic has been accompanied by a decline in ASRS reporting…
