The airline industry historically talks more about no seat than air quality.
Paris:
Aircraft manufacturers and airlines are launching an urgent initiative to convince nervous travelers that the air they breathe on board airplanes is safe, saying it is essential to rebuild a travel industry wiped out by the new coronavirus.
Boeing has appointed former chief engineering and development officer Mike Delaney to lead broader efforts to build confidence, and Airbus executives say the industry is moving from an initial crisis phase to public confidence.
Among other things, this sparked a concerted effort to explain how cabin air filtration works in order to dispel the myth that the pressure fuselage contains only static or recycled air.
Health officials are still quantifying various sources of transmission of COVID-19 caused by the virus, but attention is focused on the risk of catching airborne droplets by coughing, sneezing and touching passengers infected surfaces.
The airline industry historically talks more about no seat than air quality. This must have changed in the wake of the pandemic.
“This is to explain what we do for passenger safety in the broadest sense: aircraft safety but also health safety,” said Jean-Brice Dumont, technical director of Airbus.
In an office building, air is exchanged about four times an hour On a modern jet plane, which goes up to 20 to 30 times.
“An airplane’s air system is as good as anything you will be exposed to,” said Delaney.
Air circulation is just one of many techniques to reduce the potential for the virus to spread on board, including thorough cleaning of the aircraft and screening for signs of passenger illness, he added. .
In most cases, compressed air is sent from the clean part of an engine – not contaminated by the fuel that is added later – to the air conditioning packs and from there to the cabin ceiling fans.
The two planners say that the cabin air pours down and not over the entire length of the fuselage, which reduces the risk of infection.
Half of this air is then recycled through hospital grade HEPA filters designed to remove 99.97% of contaminants, including viruses. The other half is rinsed outside by valves.
Planners say the cabin air is changed every two to three minutes, although scientists warn that in reality the air is always a mixture, but the faster the flow, the older the air. diluted quickly.
“The air turns around very, very quickly on the plane in terms of the air exchange rate. From this point of view, the plane’s systems are very good,” said Professor Byron Jones of Kansas. State University, which helped recommend air standards.
HIGH OCCUPANCY
But airflow is not the only part of a complex equation.
“The biggest challenge you have on an airplane is the extremely high occupancy density. You have a lot of people crammed into a small space, and you have to bring in a lot of air to ventilate that space in order to maintain air quality. ” Said Jones.
US centers for disease control and prevention say the virus will spread between people in close contact or within 6 feet, about half the width of many cabins.
Drafts over such short distances would be the most difficult to predict. Passengers have some control through the individual air outlets nicknamed “gaspers” above each seat.
On average, twisting them makes things “a little better, but there are no guarantees,” said Jones.
Although filtered, precise air jets could, in the worst case, push nearby virus particles onto a passenger’s face. On the other hand, the air shower could have the positive effect of limiting the lateral movements of the air.
Faced with such questions, Boeing and Airbus have deployed engineers to examine seat-to-seat air flows – using the same advanced physics involved in the wind tunnel tests of a wing.
“We are actively running simulations to see if we can recommend something for the individual air jets,” said Dumont.
The specter of contamination in flight goes back at least to the SARS epidemic in 2003, although no link has been proven.
In March of the same year, a 72-year-old man infected with SARS, who is also a coronavirus, took a flight from Hong Kong to Beijing. At least 22 of the 119 passengers and two crew members later developed the disease.
This was the only significant case of in-flight transmission, but prompted measures to prevent sick passengers from boarding aircraft.
Such “sidewalk to sidewalk” measures must again be part of the strategy to prevent the new virus from taking off, said Delaney. Research on technologies such as ultraviolet cleaning systems and antimicrobial materials could join the fight in the future.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
