Avaition Week - Karen Walker
How big will the changes need to be in commercial aircraft ventilation to minimize transition of the coronavirus? Transmission can be minimized by downflow ventilation in the cabin-—could this be a fast retrofit? How would it be verified that air inside an airplane cabin is safe?
Air Transport World Editor-in-Chief Karen Walker responds:
All modern airliners have very sophisticated cabin air systems with hospital-standard HEPA filters, so air is both cleaned and kept moving on a continuous basis.
This is probably the single biggest factor as to why there have been some known cases of people boarding airliners for long flights and it later being discovered they were infected with COVID-19 before they boarded, but follow up tracing has seen no cases of transmission to other passengers....more