Jet manufacturers and airlines are launching an urgent initiative to convince nervous travelers that the air they breathe on planes is safe, believing this is critical to rebuilding a travel industry floored by the novel coronavirus.
Rosanna Philpott reports.
You may be one of many who are anxious about air quality on planes.
Airlines are trying to convince nervous travelers it’s perfectly safe, amid efforts to relaunch a grounded travel industry.
They’re battling a perception that pressurized cabins only contain static or recycled air.
But that’s false.
In an office building, air is typically exchanged around four times every hour.
On a modern jet, that rises to 20 to 30 times.
In most cases, compressed air is fed from the clean part of an engine to air conditioning packs.
From there, it flows to fans in the cabin ceiling - where it’s dispersed downwards, not lengthways.
Half of that is then recycled through filters, designed to remove 99.97% of contaminants.
The other half is flushed outside through valves.
Planemakers say cabin air is renewed every 2-3 minutes.
Scientists caution that, in reality, air is always a blend.
Air currents over short distances are hard to predict.
Boeing and Airbus have deployed engineers to examine seat-to-seat airflows, to better-understand how to reduce the risk of in-flight transmission.
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