PARIS - Jet manufacturers and airlines are launching an urgent initiative to convince nervous travellers that the air they breathe on planes is safe, believing this is critical to rebuilding a travel industry floored by the novel coronavirus.
The air-travel industry historically talks more about seat pitch than air quality. That's had to change as a result of the pandemic. Both planemakers say cabin air pours downwards not lengthways through the fuselage, reducing risks of infection. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the virus is thought to spread between people in close contact or less than 6 feet apart, around half the width of many cabins.
Faced with such questions, Boeing and Airbus have deployed engineers to examine seat-to-seat air flows - using the same advanced physics at play in wind-tunnel testing of a wing.