Mask-Wearing Behaviors in Air Travel During Coronavirus Pandemic – An Extended Theory of Planned Behavior Model

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the air transport industry, forcing airlines to take measures to ensure the safety of passengers and crew members. Among the many protective measures, a mask mandate onboard the airplane is an important one, but travelers’ maskwearing intentions during flight remain uninvestigated especially in the US where mask use is a topic of on-going debate. This study focused on the mask use of airline passengers when they fly during COVID-19, using the theory of planned behavior (TPB) model to examine the relationship between nine predicting factors and the mask-wearing intention in the aircraft cabin. A survey instrument was developed to collect data from 1,124 air travelers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), and the data was statistically analyzed using structural equation modeling and logistic regression. Results showed that attitude, descriptive norms, risk avoidance, and information seeking significantly influenced the travelers’ intention to wear a mask during flight during COVID-19. Group analysis indicated that the four factors influenced mask-wearing intentions differently in young, middle-aged, and senior travelers. The results further show a significant impact of the three factors on mask-wearing intention and a strong mediating effect of attitude, indicating that attitude can be used to better understand the relationships between the factors. When five demographic characteristics – age, gender, education, income, and ethnicity were considered, all except gender could help to explain the group variations in factor impact and the mediating effect in mask-wearing intentions. It was also found that demographic and travel characteristics including age, education, income, and travel frequency can be used to predict if the airline passenger was willing to pay a large amount to switch to airlines that adopted different mask policies during COVID-19. The findings of this study fill the research gap of air travelers’ intentions to wear a mask when flying during a global pandemic and provide recommendations for mask wearing policies to help the air transport industry recover from COVID-19

Epidemiological Models for Transportation Applications: Secondary Crashes

Secondary crashes or crashes that occur in the wake of a preceding or primary crash are among the most critical incidents occurring on highways, due to the exceptional danger they present to the first responders and victims of the primary crash. In this work, we developed a self-exciting temporal point process to analyze crash events data and classify it into primary and secondary crashes. Our model uses a self-exciting function to describe secondary crashes while primary crashes are modeled using a background rate function. We fit the model to crash incidents data from the Florida Department of Transportation, on Interstate-4 (I-4) highway for the years 2015-2017, to determine the model parameters. These are used to estimate the probability that a given crash is secondary crash and to find queue times. To represent the periodically varying traffic levels and crash incidents, we model the background rate, as a stationary function, a sinusoidal non-stationary function, and a piecewise non-stationary function. We show that the sinusoidal non-stationary background rate fits the traffic data better and replicates the daily and weekly peaks in crash events due to traffic rush hours. Secondary crashes are found to account for up to 15.09% of traffic incidents, depending on the city on the I-4 Highway

Privacy and Unmanned Aerial Systems Integration in the National Aerospace System: Navigating Fourth Amendment Concerns

A variety of challenges to the successful assimilation of UASs into the National Airspace System (NAS) currently exist. Technical issues and human factors related hurdles have brought forth a range of research efforts to help to mitigate or resolve these challenges. Regulations and legislation play a significant role in controlling or restricting the use of UASs in the NAS. Currently there appears to be a contraposition of sentiment between the Federal Aviation Administration and Congress on the inclusion of UASs in the NAS. Congress has called for the adoption of UAS operations in the NAS by 2015 yet the FAA has placed an assortment of restrictions and obstacles on the certification and use of UASs which severely inhibit research and development activities. Yet another setback has recently surfaced when the FAA suspended its selection process for UAS test sites due to privacy concerns. This new obstacle has the potential to further delay UAS integration. The privacy debate is inherent to American society. So important is the issue that it is covered in the Fourth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution. Public outcry concerning unwarranted or unknown observation is nothing new. With the advent of new surveillance technologies and techniques, concern that they may be used in violation of personal rights and protections has grown. Examples include wiretapping, electronic surveillance, video monitoring, and other types of law enforcement and related agency activities. This study identified themes among the dissent for such technologies as well as for UAS integration. Further, commonalities and occurrences in previous privacy-related confrontations were characterized in order to serve as a guide for efforts to resolve the UAS privacy quandary

Public Perception of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS): A Survey of Public Knowledge Regarding Roles, Capabilities, and Safety While Operating Within the National Airspace System (NAS)

A variety of challenges to the successful assimilation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) into the National Airspace System (NAS) exists. Aside from technical and legislative challenges, another setback has recently surfaced when the FAA suspended its selection process for UAS test sites due to privacy concerns. This new obstacle has the potential to further delay UAS integration. Very little literature or coverage of UAS domestic operations and accidents have been published and made available to the public at large. As a result, the public has very little information upon which to form any realistic or reasonable opinions concerning the integration of UASs into the NAS and the threat to public safety that may ensue as a result of this planned action by the FAA and private industry. There are many safety related issues that the public are not aware of that may adversely affect decisions made by the FAA to move forward with full scale integration of UASs into the NAS. If the UAS community is to be successful in its efforts to initiate widespread use of UASs over populated areas in the NAS, they would do well to consider educating the public on the pros and cons of using UASs in the NAS, and should keep the public informed of progress in areas that directly affect the public such as safety. This study will consist of a review of the current literature related to public opinion polling and public perception about domestic UAS operations. Results of a pilot public opinion poll (n = 223) developed during this research is presented in a reflective, narrative format. An overwhelming majority of polled individuals (95%) were familiar with UASs. Slightly less than half of respondents agreed they would be comfortable with UASs in domestic airspace with firefighting and weather monitoring being the most acceptable uses of the systems. The highest level of concern about UASs (46%) was privacy versus safety (38%). Results indicate the public is cognizant of UAS operations but are not ready to accept widespread use of the technologies. Also, privacy does seem to be a primary concern

Multiscale Model for Hurricane Evacuation and Fuel Shortage

Hurricanes are powerful agents of destruction with significant socioeconomic impacts. High-volume mass evacuations, disruptions to the supply chain, and fuel hoarding from non-evacuees have led to localized fuel shortages lasting several days during recent hurricanes. Hurricane Irma in 2017, resulted in the largest evacuation in the nation affecting nearly 6.5 million people and saw widespread fuel shortages throughout the state of Florida. While news reports mention fuel shortages in several past hurricanes, the crowd source platform Gasbuddy has quantified the fuel shortages in the recent hurricanes. The analysis of this fuel shortage data suggested fuel shortages exhibited characteristics of an epidemic. Fundamentally, as fueling stations were depleted, the latent demand spread to neighboring stations and propagated throughout the community, similar to an epidemiological outbreak. In this paper, a Susceptible- Infected –Recovered (SIR) epidemic model was developed to study the evolution of fuel shortage during a hurricane evacuation. Within this framework, an optimal control theory was applied to identify an effective intervention strategy. Further, the study found a linear correlation between traffic demand during the evacuation of Hurricane Irma and the resulting fuel shortage data from Gasbuddy. This correlation was used in conjunction with the State-wide Regional Evacuation Study Program (SRESP) surveys to estimate the evacuation traffic and fuel shortages for potential hurricanes affecting south Florida. The epidemiological SIR dynamics and optimal control methodology was applied to analyze the fuel shortage predictions and to develop an effective refueling strategy

Study of Synthetic Vision Systems (SVS) and Velocity-vector Based Command Augmentation System (V-CAS) on Pilot Performance

This study investigated the effects of synthetic vision system (SVS) concepts and advanced flight controls on single pilot performance (SPP). Specifically, we evaluated the benefits and interactions of two levels of terrain portrayal, guidance symbology, and control-system response type on SPP in the context of lower-landing minima (LLM) approaches. Performance measures consisted of flight technical error (FTE) and pilot perceived workload. In this study, pilot rating, control type, and guidance symbology were not found to significantly affect FTE or workload. It is likely that transfer from prior experience, limited scope of the evaluation task, specific implementation limitations, and limited sample size were major factors in obtaining these results

Effect of Low-Stress Fatigue on the Off-Crack-Plane Fracture Energy in Engineered Cementitious Composites

This paper presented an experimental study on the flexural properties of engineered cementitious composites (ECCs). The bending fatigue damage, residual deformation, and damage characteristics were investigated after a certain number of low stress levels in fatigue load. The composite fracture energy and fiber-bridging fracture energy were calculated by the J integral. It is observed that the number of cracks increased with the increment of stress levels, and most of the cracks were formed during the earlier stage of the dynamic test. The deformation capability decreased with the increment of stress levels while the reduction of the ultimate load was minor after the dynamic load. Furthermore, the strain-hardening phenomenon of the specimen enhanced initially and then weakened with the increment of stress levels. The residual equivalent yield strength became smaller with the increase of stress levels. Meanwhile, the trend was mild at low stress levels and then became steep at high stress levels