Airlines want to drop COVID-19 travel precautions. Is now the right time?

“I would want to see cases going down again and see the last of the hotspots die down a bit more,” he added.

Airline executives argue that it’s time to lift mask mandates because they’re no longer required in many other public environments, like restaurants and retail stores, where the risk of transmission is higher.

“It makes no sense that people are still required to wear masks on airplanes, yet are allowed to congregate in crowded restaurants, schools and at sporting events without masks, despite none of these venues having the protective air-filtration system that aircraft do,” the CEOs of nearly a dozen airlines, including American, Delta, JetBlue, and United, wrote in their letter.

Potential “explosion of cases”

Air quality on airplanes is generally good because planes are equipped with hospital-grade HEPA filters that constantly recirculate fresh air into the cabin. But the risk of transmission would increase substantially if most passengers, particularly infectious individuals, were to stop wearing masks.

Mercedes Carnethon, vice chair of the department of preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said that for most healthy Americans who are vaccinated against COVID-19, eliminating masks on flights is unlikely to pose a serious risk. But the calculation changes if you’re seated near someone infected with disease.

“Air quality is good on an airplane. However, when you’re sitting side by side with someone who has a COVID infection, perhaps someone 10 rows behind you won’t contract it, but it won’t protect the person sitting next to you,” Carnethon told CBS MoneyWatch.

“If you roll back every mitigation strategy at one time, you have great potential to see an explosion of cases, and that’s risky,” she added.

When it comes to restoring confidence in air travel, Carnethon also said that ending mask mandates could end up having the opposite effect that airlines intend.

“The reason they are pushing to drop them are economic reasons they perceive would help boost travel, but they are going to end up excluding a demographic for which it’s not safe to be in an enclosed space without masks, including older adults and adults who are immune-compromised,” she said. “From a business point of view, I don’t know if it will yield the economic gains they think it will if people who are at risk make the decision not to travel.”

A burden on airline staff

In pushing to drop the in-flight virus rules, airline CEOs also highlight the toll that enforcing pandemic health measures has taken on airline personnel. That includes ticketing agents tasked with verifying COVID-19 test results and flight attendants effectively assigned the role of mask enforcers, resulting in altercations with unruly passengers who refused to mask up.

“This is not a function they are trained to perform and subjects them to daily challenges by frustrated customers. This, in turn, takes a toll on their own well-being,” the CEOs said.

Indeed, testy passengers who have refused to comply with mask mandates have been a challenge for flight attendants.

“It was already a difficult enough job to be a flight attendant, but then to have to be a bouncer on top of that and to do so at 30,000 feet in the air, frankly it’s asking too much,” Scott Keyes, a flight expert and founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights, a website that finds deals on airfare for its members, told CBS MoneyWatch. “There have been so many disruptions and air-rage incidents, and I think a lot of that can be traced back to these rules — folks bristling at having to wear masks and at other people not wearing their masks correctly. I think once it’s no longer a rule, we’ll probably see significantly less of it.”

A better solution?

Keyes thinks eliminating the requirement that international travelers show a negative COVID-19 test result would have a more significant effect on passengers’ travel decisions, given that testing can be inconvenient and that a positive test result could mean having to quarantine abroad.