Russian Airlines Have Reserved A Special Place For Passengers Who Refuse To Wear Masks

Illustration - Airplane (Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Russian airline Aeroflot announced it would have special seats on its planes for passengers who refuse to wear masks.

"It is very important for us to ensure the safety of all passengers," said Yulia Spivakova, a spokeswoman for the airline in a statement.

Quoting CNN, Saturday, January 23, 2021, Aeroflot, which is Russia's largest national airline, has a policy that travelers must wear masks when boarding and on the plane. Masks can be removed when eating, drinking, or changing masks.

However, it appears that some of the passengers did not comply with these guidelines. Because an airplane cannot just stop in the air and expel passengers who violate the rules, Aeroflot has assigned specific seats on each flight for passengers who cannot or will not follow the mask-wearing policy.

"(This) does not exclude the application of other accountable measures for violations of the rules for the use of personal protective equipment on board aircraft," added Spivakova.

Policies for wearing masks on planes vary around the world. Individual operators often create their own rules. Most of the burden of enforcing this policy falls on flight attendants.

Russia is not the only country where mask regulations on planes are a problem. In the United States (US) several incidents have occurred on flights in which passengers refused to wear masks.

In July 2020, a Southwest Airlines flight was returning to Denver International Airport when a fight broke out between several passengers. One of them claims that it is their "constitutional right" not to wear masks.

In August 2020, Delta Air Lines announced that it had imposed nearly 250 lifetime bans on travelers who refuse to wear masks. The following month, two passengers on two different domestic flights in Japan were removed from the plane before takeoff for not wearing masks.

Aeroflot has not announced whether it will impose a long-term ban or other penalties for passengers who refuse to wear masks during flights. But isolating them to certain areas of the plane could reduce the chance that a traveler who is not wearing a mask could pass on the coronavirus to one of their seatmates.

The Importance of Masks in Aviation

The use of masks in flight is very important. In October 2020, the importance of masks on flights was attested to by a case from Hong Kong, where health officials had carefully tested and tracked all the passengers who landed.

"They tested everyone with PCR on arrival, quarantined them for 14 days and then tested the passengers again," said infectious disease doctor David O. Freedman of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

So health officials there know which passengers boarded the plane when they were infected with the virus and whether they infected anyone else on the plane.

Freedman researched Emirates flights from Dubai to Hong Kong between 16 June 2020 and 5 July 2020. What he found is quite clear. During those three weeks, Emirates had five flights with seven or more passengers infected with COVID-19 on each flight.

Without a mask, he believes there will be many cases. Freedman and colleagues found several other high-risk flights including an executive jet flying from Tokyo to Tel Aviv, Israel, with two of the 11 passengers infected with the coronavirus at the time.