All travellers are now required to wear non-medical masks or face coverings during travel April 18, 2020

Starting Monday, April 20, the Government of Canada has announced that all travellers must have a removable non-medical mask or face covering large enough to cover their mouth and nose during their travel through Canadian airports and in-flight.

• Travellers must confirm that they have the mandatory non-medical mask or face covering as part of the registration or check-in process otherwise they will not be allowed to continue on their journey.
• Travellers will be asked to cover their mouth and nose at airport screening points, when they cannot physically distance from others, or as directed by airline employees or public health officials.
• Travellers are advised to follow the current Public Health Agency of Canada’s (PHAC) guidance on face coverings here. PHAC has included requirements for an appropriate non-medical mask or face covering in addition to instructions on how to use a mask and instructions for making a face covering if you are unable to purchase one.
• YVR is not able to provide any form of masks at the airport. It is the passenger’s responsibility to have the appropriate face covering.

Transport Canada has outlined a number of exceptions where face coverings must not be worn:

• Children under two years old.
• Passengers with breathing difficulties unrelated to COVID-19.
• At the boarding gate, after handing documents to the air carrier representative, a passenger will be asked to step back to an appropriate distance and lower their face covering for identity verification. After the verification is complete, the passenger can then re-cover their mouth and nose before collecting their documents.
• During the flight, when the safety of the person could be endangered by wearing a face covering; or when the person is eating, drinking or taking oral medications.
• At the Customs-controlled area of the airport. Travellers will need to lower their face covering to have their photo taken at the Primary Inspection Kiosk or when asked to do so by a Canada Border Services Agency officer or a Public Health Agency of Canada and/or provincial or territorial official.

PHAC has stated that wearing a non-medical mask or face covering over the mouth and nose is another way to prevent your respiratory droplets from contaminating others or landing on surfaces. Existing public health and good hygiene practices including physical distancing and frequent hand washing, are still the most effective methods to limit the spread of the virus.

The new federal requirement is in addition to the PHAC measures that are already in place at YVR including: mandating airlines to assess all travellers for COVID-19 symptoms at the point of origin, requiring travellers to self-declare if they have symptoms at border kiosks, increased screening from CBSA officers and more. For more information on how YVR is addressing COVID-19, please visit yvr.ca/coronavirus. 

More information about the new regulation is available on the Transport Canada website here.

source : https://www.yvr.ca/en/updates/new-federal-regulations-for-air-travellers

By Nick Kampouris – Apr 21, 2020

File photo

Greece’s Minister of Tourism Harry Theocharis said that Greek authorities are mulling the introduction of a ”Health Passport” which will serve as proof that an individual is not suffering from the COVID-19 coronavirus.

The Minister said that Greece will only have a three-month tourist season this year, between July and September, but added that if the situation develops positively, then the “shoulder season” months of October and November might see an increased number of tourists in the country.

However, the biggest challenge for the tourism-dependent country will be to determine who will be able to enter Greece and how.

Minister Theocharis said that there is an ongoing discussion at the European Union level to determine the ways in which EU citizens will be allowed to go on vacations this year.

Brussels’ aim is to provide a credible test for every individual who wishes to go on summer holidays anywhere in Europe.

This test will have to be conducted by the member-state of origin of the traveler, before he or she boards an airplane or any other means of transport.

It is still unclear at this point whether non-EU nationals will be allowed to visit the country at all this summer or not.

source : https://greece.greekreporter.com/2020/04/21/greece-considers-health-passport-for-summer-2020-visitors/

Like the rest of the European airport industry, Frankfurt Airport has been hit by the COVID-19 crisis and the resulting travel and aviation restrictions imposed country-by-country worldwide. This has significantly impacted Fraport’s Frankfurt Airport global hub – affecting all business areas from flight operations to ground handling, retail and cargo (especially belly cargo on passenger flights).

“In February 2020, the COVID-19 crisis hit our important China/Asian market first – causing our traffic that month to fall by 4.4% year-on-year to 4.4 million passengers,” says Robert Payne, Fraport international spokesman.

Since then, the crisis has spread around the globe. This is underscored by the dramatic fall in weekly traffic figures at Frankfurt from about 331,000 passengers from March 16-22, shrinking further to about 119,000 passengers from March 23 to 29, and dropping to only about 66,000 passengers from March 30 to April 5. “This represents a decrease of about 95% compared to the same calendar week of the previous year. After the repatriation flights for stranded German tourists finish in the next few days, Frankfurt Airport’s passenger traffic will be negligible,” Payne explains.

Grounded aircraft parked on the Northwest Runway, which is now temporarily closed during the COVID-19 crisis. Source: Fraport AG

Ensuring FRA’s role as “system critical” infrastructure

Ensuring FRA’s role as “system critical” infrastructure

Health and safety is, of course, always the industry’s first priority. From the very beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, Fraport has been in very close contact with the relevant health authorities (at municipal, state and federal levels), implementing all of the required measures immediately and decisively.

“On the commercial side, Fraport also responded quickly to lower variable costs as fast as possible,” says Payne. “Already in February 2020, Fraport launched major cost-reductions for all of its corporate administrative and operational areas at Frankfurt Airport. New staff hires are only possible in exceptional and justified cases. All staff have been offered voluntary unpaid vacation or temporary reduced working hours – where compatible with operations. On 21 March, over 18,000 Fraport staff across operational and administrative departments were put on official short-time work.”

These measures are designed to cut costs and adjust staff deployment to falling demand – and to protect jobs. Furthermore, Fraport’s executive board and senior management are contributing to a special COVID-19 fund to help staff needing urgent financial help. Fraport also recently announced that dividends will not be paid out to shareholders for the 2019 fiscal year.

Frankfurt Airport’s Terminal 2 closed on 7 April 2020 due to the COVID-19 crisis. Source: Fraport AG

“In tandem to the slowdown in traffic, we have incrementally closed passenger and airfield infrastructure for aircraft and passenger infrastructure,” Payne adds.

For example, two of FRA’s four runways have been temporarily taken out of operation. The Northwest landing runway is now inactive and is being used as a parking lot for grounded jets. Meanwhile, Terminal 2 has closed with all passenger services bundled into Terminal 1.

“Nevertheless, FRA is still operationally open to air traffic to ensure the airport’s role as ‘system critical’ infrastructure,” Payne explains. “As Europe’s busiest air cargo hub, Frankfurt Airport and its cargo community partners are working to ensure cargo handling and traffic operations for the vital shipments of medical, pharma and other supplies, as well as for keeping global supply chains for industry in motion.”

The first important step: be prepared before the crisis develops

Robert Payne, Fraport international spokesman: “As Europe’s busiest air cargo hub, Frankfurt Airport and its cargo community partners are working to ensure cargo handling and traffic operations for the vital shipments of medical, pharma and other supplies, as well as for keeping global supply chains for industry in motion.” Source: Fraport AG

In terms of knowledge-sharing and effectively responding to COVID-19, Payne comments that the first important step is to be prepared before the crisis develops. “In Frankfurt, we could build on our experience with former epidemics such as SARS, Ebola, the swine flu – as well as other crisis situations. We have continuously improved and trained our defined procedures over the years. And we have a very engaged and experienced medical team of doctors and staff onsite, who provide advice to our management team in such a crisis.”

On the financial side, it is extremely important to reduce variable costs as quickly as possible, when the traffic collapses almost completely. “For a stock-listed airport company like Fraport AG, it is obviously important to maintain liquidity and financial flexibility,” says Payne. “One advantage of such a slowdown is that airports can carry out renovation projects more easily and economically when traffic is limited – which is what we are doing at Frankfurt.”

While it is difficult to reliably forecast the extent and duration of the COVID-19 crisis, it must be assumed that the huge decline in air traffic volumes will continue during the weeks and months ahead. Airports and other partners will need to cooperate closely in reviving aviation in a coordinated manner with the support and understanding of policymakers and other stakeholders.

“Airports provide direct employment for millions of people worldwide,” says Payne. “In addition, airports serve as economic engines for the giant travel and tourism industry – as well as our cities, regions and nations. The coronavirus crisis has demonstrated that aviation is system-critical for our economies, societies and civilisation – both in normal times and in times of crisis.”

After several years of strong growth, the aviation industry is now facing a very serious crisis – far exceeding all previous events including 9/11, SARS, the global financial meltdown, and Europe’s volcanic ash-cloud crisis. “We can expect the aviation sector to look substantially different in the post-COVID-19 world. But aviation has survived these major crisis situations in the past and re-emerged stronger each time.”

One advantage of such a slowdown is that airports can carry out renovation projects more easily and economically when traffic is limited. Renovation is in progress on Frankfurt Airport’s South Runway. Source: Fraport AG

source : http://www.airport-business.com/2020/04/frankfurt-airport-responds-covid-19-crisis-defined-procedures-major-cost-reductions/

Emirates in coordination with Dubai Health Authority (DHA) has introduced additional precautions for traveller. Apart from following strict onboard hygiene, the airline has also organized on-site Covid-19 tests for passengers. The blood test is conducted in Terminal 3 and tests are given out in 10 minutes. Emirates is the first airline to conduct on-site covid tests for passengers.

by Matt Hamblen | Apr 16, 2020 11:24am

LiDAR, infrared and IoT device certification will all be needed for future virus detection as the world copes with COVID-19 and future viruses. (Infineon)

Tech companies are stepping up Internet of Things technologies to protect against COVID-19 and future viruses by using LiDAR and infrared cameras to detect a person’s body temperature from a distance or even handwashing.

Keeping the data secure in such detection is also going to be a challenge. One approach is to put a chip inside an IoT device when it is manufactured to enable strong authentication and secure communication, mainly to guard against device counterfeiting.

Hitachi Vantara has touted forward looking infrared cameras (FLIR) cameras to detect the temperature of a person from a distance. That way a passenger on a train or a worker or a customer in a store can be non-intrusively screened, according to a blog from Mark Jules, global vice president of smart spaces and video intelligence.

If a high temperature is detected, an organization can direct that person to a secondary confirming test or quarantine.  Sensing elevated body temperature can be a first step in a layered approach to detection, Jules noted.  Such technology is already used at airports, but many organizations could use such technology.

He also suggested that 3D LiDAR combined with computer vision and machine learning can learn to detect correct handwashing. It can also be used to monitor patients when they fall out of a bed, slump over in a restroom or slip on a floor to quicken response time by caregivers. 

Combining data from these detection methods can help organizations identify trends to note high-risk areas.

To keep data private and secure from IoT devices that may have been counterfeited, Sectigo and Infineon Technologies have developed automated certificate provisioning of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chips for private key storage.

“Including a TPM chip in an IoT device design is the first step in enabling strong authentication and secure communication for IoT devices,” said Alan Grau, vice president of IoT/Embedded at Sectigo, a provider of PKI systems and services.

Sectigo and Infineon enable IoT device makers to deploy strong authentication and secure communication for IoT devices during the manufacturing of the device. 

Their approach integrates the Infineon OPTIGA TPM 2.0 with Sectigo’s IoT Identity Manager product. Device makers can provision certificates into devices before they leave the factory, meeting the requirements of the California IoT Security Law, the companies said in a statement. From there, manufacturers can then track the component throughout the supply chain to protect against device counterfeiting.

Protecting against counterfeiting is seen as another way of ensuring the safety of data down the line.

source : https://www.fierceelectronics.com/electronics/hitachi-infineon-promote-iot-tech-for-viral-detection

ROBIN RILEY, WEB EDITOR
robin.riley@photonics.com
Will automated infection tracking become standard procedure in airports around the world? Real-time thermal monitoring combined with biometric data that could be immediately extracted and analyzed would help airport personnel quickly identify individuals with potential illness in even the most crowded terminals. Possible points of contact with the individual could also be tracked and identified.

To help airlines manage through the COVID-19 outbreak and beyond, Amorph Systems and VANTIQ are working with hardware and development partners, including several camera vendors such as HikVision, to develop solutions for continuous detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks inside buildings and facilities, including airports. They are also working on a dedicated SARS-CoV-2 Spread Control System for hospitals and factories in Europe and worldwide.

For airports and airlines, Amorph Systems developed an application that combines temperature information from thermal cameras and crowd density measurements from lidar with flight information and passenger flows. The system detects passengers with high temperatures and alerts airport operations control to potential contaminated areas, so they can quickly redirect passenger flows, reposition flights, close infected areas, and reallocate staff.

“Airports are under incredible pressure right now, as they address exceptional operational issues caused by COVID-19,” Frank Frauenhoffer, managing director of Amorph Systems, said. “Our application will help them manage the current situation and prepare for future waves of COVID-19 or other potential virus outbreaks.”

The application takes a holistic approach to sensing, analyzing, and reacting to data, enabling data to be distributed and acted upon quickly. When a passenger or staff person with a fever is detected, the identifying information gathered by thermal cameras is correlated with a security camera using a snapshot based on computer vision technology.

Flight details about the passenger are integrated with details about the fever event. The combined data can then be used to make decisions about whether to close an area that may have become contaminated; to determine whether other passengers may have been infected; and to determine the effect of area closures on flights and estimate potential spread.

Point-to-point tracking of passengers is done through facial recognition. The composition of the individual is captured through biometric detail, but the person remains anonymous to everyone but airport security personnel.

“In the future this could be another checkpoint that airport operators enforce,” Frauenhoffer said. Such systems are currently in use in China and Southeast Asia, and Frauenhoffer believes that Europe could be heading toward similar regulation. In the future, optical counting systems could be used to measure the number of passengers entering certain airport areas, which would allow the airport to take measures that ensure the maximum passenger density in this area is not exceeded.

Frauenhoffer said that the system is scalable. “We provide a combination of system modules that can be used to cope with various use cases, as well as to simulate what will happen if, for example, density gets too high,” he said.

Amorph Systems was able to build a fully integrated system based on their solution for Helsinki Airport and other airports in just a few weeks by partnering with VANTIQ, which provides a low-code platform for distributed, scalable, asynchronous processing of real-time data from sensors, cameras, and IoT devices. The flexible VANTIQ platform enabled Amorph to create its solution in time to address the extraordinary circumstances brought about by the COVID-19 outbreak. “We believe these systems will be critical to opening up retail stores, office buildings, airports, stadiums, factories, and health care facilities around the world,” VANTIQ CEO Marty Sprinzen said.

“VANTIQ connects everything to the security step, so that information can be immediately acted on,” Frauenhoffer said. 

source : https://www.photonics.com/Articles/An_Integrated_Optical_System_for_Containing/a65725

I recommend this excellent analysis of the aviation sector .. sorry only in french

But the scenari are so right

Hope you can get a benefit from it

Michael Landguth

by Michael Landguth, RDU International Airport CEO — April 18, 2020 .

Editor’s note: Michael Landguth is president and CEO of Raleigh Durham International Airport. Since so many TechWire readers are business travelers, we are reprinting this blog from the RDU Insider at RDU.com as a service.

MORRISVILLE – The global health pandemic has disrupted our normal routines and impacted nearly every aspect of daily life, including who we can see and where we can go. We all face these challenges together to slow the spread of the virus.

RDU’s parking decks and terminals are nearly empty as public health officials discourage discretionary travel and remind people to stay at home. We look forward to the day travel restrictions are lifted and passengers return to RDU to visit the loved ones and destinations they’ve been yearning to see.

When coronavirus first appeared, RDU quickly responded to protect the health and safety of everyone at the airport. We created a coronavirus information webpage on RDU.com and launched an educational campaign to build awareness of personal hygiene practices and social distancing guidance to reduce of the spread of the virus.

• RELATED COVERAGE: RDU, other airports will receive financial support during pandemic

We have increased cleaning and sanitation procedures throughout the airport campus. Hands-free hand sanitizing stations are located throughout the terminals and each shuttle bus is equipped with a hand sanitizing unit. We continue to explore measures to protect our guests, employees, business partners and contractors from potential exposure to COVID-19.

If you visit the airport, you will notice all guests are directed to park in the deck located between Terminals 1 and 2. We have temporarily closed all remote lots – Economy 3, Economy 4 and Express – because of low occupancy rates.

The daily maximum rate for Central is discounted to $10/day. Existing online bookings have been upgraded at no additional cost and are valid for entry to Central.

Beginning April 22, we are discontinuing shuttle service to the Express and Economy lots. Guests parked in a remote parking lot after April 22 should call (919) 840-7587 to request transportation to their vehicle.

ParkRDU fee collection is now automated to reduce potential exposure to COVID-19. Cash is only accepted at pay-on-foot stations located at entry points to the deck.

RDU is a critical part of the national infrastructure that allows for the movement of emergency supplies and personnel, as well as other cargo. We will continue to operate throughout the stay-at-home orders.

As always, if you have upcoming travel plans, we encourage you to check with your airline before coming to the airport. You can find airline contact information and the latest airport updates on RDU.com.

We wish you and your loved ones good health during these challenging times, and we’ll be here when you’re ready to fly.

source : https://www.wraltechwire.com/2020/04/18/heads-up-travelers-heres-how-covid-19-is-impacting-rdu-operations/