There are reasons to love flying in an airplane, and of course we all have our reasons for hating it and just wanting to load up our personal vehicle and drive cross-country.
When we take a customer-satisfaction survey of airlines, there is a chance that we may have a small minority of people who like the experience, and a large majority of those who have something to say that is not so glowing. You’ll probably find a lot of different complaints, ranging from losing luggage to canceling flights without warning to diverting flights, to being stuck on a tarmac for hours to inconvenient scheduling to overbooking to … well, you get the idea.
And of course, let’s not even mention TSA, shall we?
Of all the things that we could and usually do complain about air travel, one thing that isn’t noted often is the air quality in the cabin during flights. And while it’s hard to find actual evidence, there is anecdotal suggestion that the air inside a cabin at 30,000 feet may be dangerous to passengers and especially flight crews, who can spend as much as 100 hours a month on planes.
Again, there is little hard evidence to go on, but there are a lot of case studies of passengers who frequently travel by air, and flight-crew members who report getting sick on airplanes, possibly due to overexposure to contaminated air. It is believed that the air in the cabin gets engine oil from the bleed line that runs through the engines into the cabin to provide breathable air and proper air pressure.
There have been a number of cases of passengers and flight crew members reporting nausea, funny smells in the air, dizziness, headaches and other symptoms that seem to have cabin air as the commonality. However, as airlines field these complaints, they inspect the airplanes and find no problems with the system, so the planes are put back in the air.
However, an article about this seemed to suggest hat the reason no problems were found wasn’t that there really wasn’t anything wrong, but it was that the airlines couldn’t replicate flying conditions from the ground, as if the air-bleed system works differently under such pressurized circumstances six miles in the air as opposed to how it works at ground level.
Aircraft makers have repeatedly said that these claims of contaminated air have been debunked in the past, but the issue was serious enough that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) got involved and developed a study about the issue and even passed a regulation requiring all airplanes to have their air quality checked regularly.
Despite the reports, there have been no hard and fast changes to rules about air quality, nor has there been any advances in the air-bleed systems to provide better air; essentially the FAA is siding with the airline industry that these illnesses come from something other than bad air quality during flight.
You can read the article online, and check out the most recent FAA report about this issue.