How to clean an airliner | Hacker News Reader

How to clean an airliner

bbc.com

47 pointsThevet13 comments

Bed bugs can be a major problem. They thrive in the wiring looms and complex mechanical motor systems of modern airline seats, especially the flatbed types in the higher classes. I have personally experienced a bed-bug-ridden long haul flight London-Brazil. Aircrew told me mine was not an isolated incident (flatbed sleep, middle of the night bedbug attack inside my collar).

One of the issues is that certain highly effective fumigants are illegal in most countries, and those that are not are seeing developing resistance. You need powerful fumigation to get into all the tiny little areas of a very complex machine that is an aircraft. Some airlines, I am told, will wait for the aircraft to fly to a country where fumigant policy is more "relaxed" and give the plane a full dose poisoning there.

You can kill them by heating the air inside the plane. They and many other unpleasant contemporaries cannot stand a certain amount of heat.

I experienced bed bugs once and since that horror have a very uneasy feeling about hotels, trains, planes etc.

"Horror" is about the right term. I wouldn't want to wish them on anybody, except perhaps the politicians in my country.

There is one horror even greater. That is to wish the politicians in my country onto the bed bugs.

I worked for few days after high school with company that do cabin cleaning during aeroplane ground handling. This is in SouthEast Asia, and I'm dealing with budget airlines. Most have 1hour turnaround time. So imagine inside the cabin..

00:00 - Passenger disembark

00:15 - Everything started

00:20 - Cleaning/supply crew / repair crew / QC inspector (12 unit)

00:30 - Food crew (4 unit)

00:40 - Flight attendant & safety officer (8 unit)

00:50 - Cleaning crew / repair crew / safety officer /food crew disembark. I believe captain and copilot will be on the plane by now.

Each steps done by different team with almost no synergy with others. It was not pleasant experience if you consider the space inside the smallest 737. If you'd think that I'll clean every nook and cranny, you're way off your chart. We're specifically looking for visible stain(vomit/blood/soda). The only special treatment First & Business Class get is stricter QC.

If you're at all squeamish, I wouldn't recommend searching the Flyertalk forum for the word 'vomit'. There you'll also find comments like "they don't supply us with cleaning materials, we have to use the soap from the toilets [to clean up issues mid-flight]" from some flight attendants.

My SO recently left her job as a flight stewardess for a large airline, so I have heard many such interesting stories. On one of her last flights somebody in business class couldn't wait for the bathroom, so they just peed on the floor - then went back to their seat :s

So was this a flight to China, or a flight from China?

I wonder if there is study correlating ones overall health with number of flights he takes every month.

This [1] article references a study [2] you might be interested in.

Quoting from the article: "The study, which synthesises existing research on the effects of frequent travel, finds three types of consequence: physiological, psychological and emotional, and social."

[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/08/frequent-fly...

[2] http://epn.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/07/24/0308518X1559...

if you're taking >= 1 flight per month, you're probably easily in the top 5% percentile bracket for income world-wide. so, with an appropriately broad perspective, you're probably relatively healthy.

> you're probably easily in the top 5% percentile bracket for income world-wide.

Either that, or your job requires you to be on a flight every month. There /are/ such jobs.

Since flights generally take you to places with diseases your immune system isn't familiar with, I doubt you could use this to conclude anything interesting about the planes themselves.

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