American Airlines Bans Wearing Too Much Personal Protection Equipment on Board
viewfromthewing.com
viewfromthewing.com
“ When inhaled, ozone can damage the lungs. Relatively low amounts can cause chest pain, coughing, shortness of breath and throat irritation. Ozone may also worsen chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma and compromise the ability of the body to fight respiratory infections.”
EPA.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/ozone-generators-are-sold-air-cleaners
If you have concerns let the flight crew know quietly, and they can find out politely if the device is within policy (which oxygen concentrators of course are).
I don't know the protocol for air travel - do you generate O2 with a device during your travel or carry an oxygen tank?
I could imagine scenarios where a pressurized tank on an airline is bad, and also scenarios where a device would be bad too.
I've also heard of people that had medical conditions and they just weren't allowed on the plane at all.
It sounds like they're banning people from bringing them on board, on just from using them. Also there are other types of ozone generators beyond just air the ones used in air filters. There are lots of folks who are mixing ozone with blood and injecting it back into themselves in an attempt to cure covid. Whatever the risks of doing this are, someone having the machine that does this isn't going to harm other people on a flight.
Why do they need to bring it on board if they aren't going to use it? Given it's a safety risk if used and has no approved therapeutic use the rule seems fine.
> lots of folks who are mixing ozone with blood and injecting it back into themselves in an attempt to cure covid
Presumably this can wait until they land.
No checked luggage? To use at the other side? To deliver to someone else?
Air travel is horrible enough already with the BS restrictions (eg water bottles). Let’s not encourage making it even worse. Airlines are already screwed enough right now without putting off the few people that are still travelling with even more restrictions and surcharges.
"No checked luggage" is a choice. I've checked luggage specifically and only to transport something I couldn't bring in the cabin. It's not unusual.
Evidently American Airlines would disagree with you since they are imposing this rule themselves.
That's also why you can purify water with a bleach (Chlorine Dioxide) tablet, and then drink the solution harmlessly. This isn't rocket science.
(sibling comment about dose making the poison is correct, yes)
a) The virus dies quickest in the presence of direct sunlight. and b) Readily available household disinfectants are effective at killing the virus. He specifically mentions that bleach and isopropyl alcohol had been tested.
This is the immediate context in which Trump's comments about putting light inside the body and injecting disinfectant were made. There is absolutely no doubt what he meant here. Stop trying to gaslight people.
All of this is on video:
Direct quote: "Suppose we hit the body with ultraviolet light, and you said, that hasn't been checked, but we're gonna test it, and I said suppose you can bring the light inside the body, which you can do, either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you're gonna test that, too". Then he proceeds to talk about "disinfectant, which knocks it out in a minute". Crucially, at no point has Trump ever suggested anything like "injecting bleach", yet thanks to CNN and gullible people like you half the country believes he did.
I think realistically what happened is, Trump was bombarded with suggestions in his daily briefing, as usual, and used a poor choice of words to describe one of the suggestions. Contemporaneous evidence supports this: Atyu announced their work with Cedars Sinai a day or two before that press conference.
But feel free to believe the CNN version. By the way, I have some excellent build-ready swampland in Florida I'd like to sell. Interested?
Really? His direct quote is:
"I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that."
He literally asked about injecting disinfectant into the body, referencing and immediately following a briefing that talks about using household disinfectants like bleach and isopropyl alcohol against SARS-Cov-2. You're either being purposefully disingenuous, or completely failing at listening comprehension. Either way, you're clearly not changing your mind here. But maybe I can inform other people that may end up reading your nonsense.
What?
Every day I lose more faith in humanity.
If the cabin depressurises, a little oxygen mask pops down from the top. You have a few seconds to put this on your face before you're unconscious¹, and a few minutes after that for somebody else to put it on your face before you're dead. Try doing that while inside a tent.
(I'm don't know whether this conclusion is statistically valid, considering how few non-Boeing's have been depressurising v.s. the proportion of the population with COVID-19, but it feels intuitively right, and that's how these decisions have been made lately.)
¹: read "not usefully conscious"; you might still be awake, but your brain won't be doing much thinking or hand-moving.
The real safety hazard is anything that makes it harder to evacuate the plane, such as bulky clothing or eye-wear that make it harder to see in the dark or through smoke.
I particularly like the "He's doing it anyway" comment.
I imagine there are situations where they can't descend though.
On the other hand, even at 3000-4000 feet per minute, it can take a while to get from 35,000 to 10,000 ft.
If you really want nightmares about flying in that region, I recommend looking at the approach to Paro airport. 7.5k elevation, surrounded by 18k peaks, horrifying turbulences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbLHah4XUwk (Paro landing)
If you did try to fly an airliner down at a 45 degree angle, you would either have to do it with a falling-leaf stall after slowing to about 150kts (I doubt this is possible in an airliner?) or you would quickly break the speed of sound and the aircraft would disintegrate as the wings and stabilizers were ripped off. A max rate descent feels steep, but it's not that steep lol.
Some transport aircraft like the C-17 can deploy thrust reverses in flight to achieve those attitudes. I'm told the people riding in back don't enjoy it though.
Emergency descent maneuvers in the C-172 and I believe many other small aircraft actually involve a 45 degree roll angle, and whatever pitch angle achieves a desired speed (e.g. 120 kias in the C-172). This produces a tight downward spiral, the spiral helps because it moves lift off the vertical axis which lets you descend more quickly at a fixed speed - otherwise you'll speed up until the wings fall off. I suspect the 45 degrees above may have come from confusion over which axis it was around. I'm not sure what the exact justification is for the choice of 45 degrees but 60 degrees roll angle is usually considered sort of the upper limit (beyond that is technically aerobatics) so 45 is pretty commonly considered the "steep" extreme.
It looks like the procedure is different for the big boys. A quick google shows that the emergency descent procedure for the 747 is thrust closed, speedbrakes at flight position, gear down, make 320 kias. Pitch angle that produces would depend on weight but it's not going to be 45. No spiraling involved, but then 747 seems to (unsurprisingly) have a lower max bank angle (really max load factor) than smaller planes.
The point is you wouldn't even really pay attention to the pitch attitude, you'd pay attention to airspeed. The answer to "what should the pitch be" is pretty much always "whatever results in the airspeed you want."
And of course the landing itself (for airliners at least, that is) will be with the main gear first and only then does the nose wheel come down as well.
Once you've internalised that, you can't help but notice that one style of pictograms typically used to designate the "Arrivals" section of an airport (e.g. https://www.alamy.com/airport-signs-departure-and-arrivals-a...) alarmingly looks rather like a crash landing than a regular landing :-)
I should at least provide a little source material though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUUU-C-7o98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdn0465zE4o
Is that correct? People can obviously hold their breath for longer than that. Is it something like panic causing you not to hold your breath?
In a decompression event, the air is sucked out of your lungs. The air that remains has a low O2 partial pressure, and so oxygen can leak from your bloodstream into your lungs. As such the body's normal mechanisms for storing oxygen simply don't work.
Now, you have larger pressure differentials when scuba diving - every 10m of depth is an atmosphere of pressure - but the half atmosphere that you get from 10k vs 40k feet is probably still enough to cause some serious issues. (10k feet is ~0.69 atm, while 40k is ~0.19)
Male, 32 years, healthy, medium sporty.
Correction, sir. That's "blown out."
There is a thing where you deliberately hold your breath, which starts with taking a big lungful of air, which presumably is at normal pressure and contains 21-ish percent oxygen.
Even untrained individuals can hold their breath for a while like this.
There's another thing, which is what happens if the air you're trying to breathe either is at lower pressure, or has lower oxygen proportions. Either way, each breath has fewer oxygen molecules.
If you haven't prepared for this and try to continue breathing, you can quickly become short of breath, and then cognitive abilities become impaired, hampering your attempts to rectify the situation.
I wonder if the problem is that if cabin partially depressurizes by the time the masks drop, you may no longer be able to take a deep breath and hold it while taking your time putting on a mask.
I acknowledge that I do not have training in dealing with cabin depressurization. As luck would have it, my sister has worked for Air Canada for more than 30 years, I will ask her about it.
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I see some other comments about the oxygen actually coming out of your blood into your lungs at low pressure, and the air coming out of your lungs because the cabin is lower pressure than your lungs.
Those make sense, and had I trained for summiting 8,000m peaks instead of tech diving, I would have known that!
Suppose you're 2000 feet down, breathing hydrox or hydreliox. It's mostly hydrogen, maybe some helium, and less than 1% oxygen. You suddenly ascend to the surface. Instead of changing gas mixture, you try to hold the gas in your lungs and maintain the pressure.
You won't hold it in. As the pressure drops in your lungs, the dissolved gases in your blood will escape into your lungs. That drops the oxygen content in your blood.
But you only have a few dozen seconds before you become an idiot incapable of helping yourself. You can survive and be conscious for minutes in this state, but its "game over", you're not going to be helping yourself put on the oxygen mask once the critical period is up.
Given the tradeoffs of the situation (ie: your neighbor will be fine for minutes, although helpless), it makes far more sense to ensure the oxygen safety of yourself before helping other people.
No it isn't.
> you can survive and be conscious for minutes in this state
No you can't.
You are not going to remain conscious for more than a few seconds at 35000 or 40000 feet. You could potentially be between 15000 to 20000 feet but there's a reason oxygen supplementation is required above 10k feet in unpressurized cabins.
> It is the period of time from the interruption of the oxygen supply or exposure to an oxygen-poor environment to the time when useful function is lost, and the individual is no longer capable of taking proper corrective and protective action.
> It is not the time to total unconsciousness
35,000 feet is 30-seconds to 1-minute of total useful consciousness, half that for rapid decompression situations.
I stand by my estimate for "Dozens of seconds before you're an idiot". Most people will remain conscious after this time is up: they just will have become such idiots that its unlikely they will ever be able to fix their Hypoxia condition. (Slurred speech, unable to dexterously control your limbs, etc. etc. You're conscious, but no longer capable of putting on a mask even if it is dangling in front of you)
Wikipedia takes the table from an FAA document: https://www.faa.gov/pilots/training/airman_education/media/A...
There's pretty much no reason to measure "time to unconsciousness", because you're incapable of helping yourself long before you're unconscious.
At 40,000 feet, time of useful consciousness is 15-20 seconds.
See https://expertaviator.com/2012/04/19/oxygen-requirements-tim...
Basically the partial pressure of oxygen is low enough at altitude that the oxygen is driven out of your blood instead of in.
There are some breathing techniques that can offset that somewhat, but only if you are prepared and trained, which is unlikely in a sudden decompression event.
If I remember correctly, commercial aircraft are pressurized at about 8,000 ft. 25,000 ft is 5.45 psi, resulting in about 5.5 psi overpressure if you are depressurized. You might have a hard time, and you can injure your lungs doing that.
The time until you pass out will depend on your oxygenation situation before the loss of pressure, general health and fitness, activity level (panicking would be a bad idea), and a bunch of other things.
Depressurization means oxygen is quickly escaping, but that doesn't mean that people will rationally take a giant breath of air and hold it. I imagine most people continue breathing normally, or more rapidly due to increased stress. Not realizing that they are sucking in less and less oxygen, and begin to lose consciousness.
If you honestly feel like you need a full body pod, maybe you should seek a different mode of transport.
While I disagree with the risk of COVID, I would agree that if the risk was so great I should make a choice between minimum safety and my convenience of being able to mourn properly. Having a person that died or whatever shouldn't suddenly mean I'm the victim of the day and everyone else should bend over to make my day better. If anything, that wouldn't even scale.
That said it's moot because I personally have neither option heh.
I don't see the reason for banning these outright though, maybe just choose a section of the cabin where people wearing these can be grouped. It's convenient for everyone and doesn't pose any extra risks for the rest of the passengers.
It would be less like an obese person than a normal weight person wearing a fat suit which they discard and throw in the aisle if they have to emergency deplane.
How is someone wearing a full body pod in a window seat (as pictured in the article) causing problems for others?
Note that in-flight crew are generally tasked with getting everyone evacuated, so making their job more difficult endangers more than just the pod-wearer.
Is there anything that says this kind of "tent" is significantly safer than normal PPE? If not, why use them? This feels like something bought from an infomercial or something.
And most importantly: if you go on a flight, you are at risk of exposure to the virus. Your time in the airplane seat is probably the safest bit of the whole journey, and you aren't going to wear the tent in all the other situations on your journey like check in, boarding,...
Healthcare workers do, in fact, become infected with COVID-19 at unacceptable rates.
Honestly, right now, for an elderly person, the covid risk is probably higher.
(That's not to say that they're incapable of taking it into account; I'm sure most of them would be able to understand and use the concepts. They just don't.)
Obesity and wheelchairs and people on the way to Magaluf who've spent the morning in the airport Wetherspoons also make it harder to evacuate.
Land's End is pretty GoT-y though - that's the most Westerly place in England (possibly GB? Probably a Scottish island is further West.) though I'm not sure if the meaning was ever literal, or if it was named after knowing that there did in fact lie other lands out there.
If there is a loss of oxygen, you may only have a few seconds to react before losing consciousness, and also to avoid brain damage.
(And regarding blocking the way for others: as long as it's easier to get by them than to get by some of the very large people who are allowed to fly, that should be OK too.)
If someone plugs up the emergency exit, someone else stays stuck inside the plane.
> these types of PPE are safety concerns, especially tents / pods which can slow access to critical safety procedures, including emergency evacuations and use of oxygen masks
Yet even after quoting that message from the airline, the author recommends they instead sell those items themselves, without addressing the safety issue. I agree that the airline's position here is reasonable. That said, I also wouldn't be taking any non-essential flights.
There seems to be a prevalent "if you're not with us you're against us" attitude that seeps through the entire society.
The idea that there may be a middle road somewhere seems to have been completely lost. This is something I noticed in several different areas, and COVID is just one of them. The most obvious example is the political system of course.
> Personal face / body pods
Are they talking about these things?
Sitting on the aisle where they may impede the escape of another passenger who is a stranger, not acceptable. But that may even be misinformed. Obese people on the aisle present a formidable obstacle as well.
As since obesity is (a bit) skewed by race, depending on the age group, you'd be looking at disparate impact lawsuits.
Whereas PPE is purely individual choice. I would expect a fair amount of judicial respect for the former, but maybe not the latter.
Just couple weeks ago there was an incident in my country, where a domestic flight had to emergency land to kick out a person on the ground of cabin disturbances, who was also not wearing a mask.
Story goes as follows: the person refused masks for claimed medical conditions, while pointing out that the mask policies at this point are voluntary basis. Airline crew accepted that and the plane took off, but then the person didn't like voices from other passengers around(?) and started harassing crews to order them to make an apology for the person(??) to the point the plane landed and person was forced out. Damages are estimated at $100k ranges, flight was delayed by couple hours, and the person in question is still standing boldly on media interviews in refusing masks, "defending rights", and demanding apologies. In short I think the person was legitimately bit autistic aside from being a complete jerk.
But clearly the pain of facial masks vary person to person, so be it developmental issues or skin conditions or ear or facial shape issues the masks could be beyond their tolerances. I wonder what will be the best course forward...
For the small minority of people who are psychologically unable to wear a mask or have read so much online material that they have become violently against them, they can simply use a car to drive to their destination while the vast majority of the traveling public simply follows the rules.
> We’ve begun using new breakthrough SurfaceWise2 spraying solution
> We require everyone to wear an approved mask or face covering to reduce the risk of virus transmission
> We also offer extra wipes (where available) for customers to clean the area around them
I think the current science is that there is very little evidence of significant risk of transmission from surfaces. (3 of those 4 points).
Yet we are still obsessed with surface hygiene. I guess because it's something we can do... but if we spent all the money being spent on surface cleaning on things that actually are more likely to reduce transmission (like, say, ventilation; or even on research to learn more), we'd reduce transmission more.
Those things they are banning they probably have to ban for good reasons of safety etc. But surface hygiene is no substitute.
Reallocating such a measly sum to other areas is very unlikely to make a measurable difference. Infinitesimal costs can be justified by even very minor benefit.
That is not the case. It depends on their effectiveness. If wiping down reduces risk 4% but better ventilation reduces risk 70%, the calculation of "breaking even" is very different. We don't know these exact numbers for covid, but as best as we can tell the risk reduction of this kind of surface cleaning is pretty minimal.
It's hygiene theater.
Hiring someone to pray for health on the plane would be cheaper than actual effective measures too -- hey you could probably hire just one person nationally to pray for health on ALL planes, a bargain! 'at what point will actual effective measures "break even" with hiring someone to pray' is a ridiculous question.
And again, wiping surfaces does more than fight covid. The flu, the common cold, and countless more diseases are very effectively countered by washing down surfaces. If you make federal minimum wage and you miss work for 2 days because of the flu, that's $120 in lost earnings. The average person flying probably makes significantly more than that. Even if wiping down your seat only reduces the odds of getting the flu by 0.15% you're still coming out ahead at minimum wage; if you make $100k/yr it need only be 0.02% effective.
Also it's worth noting that contact with contaminated surfaces is still believed to be a major means of transmission of the disease. It is airborne transmission of covid which is still being debated though there seems to be mounting evidence in support of it as an additional transmission pathway.
I suspect you are confusing surface transmission potentially being the cause of a relatively small number of infections with it not being a significant risk.
> In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidelines to clarify that while COVID-19 spreads easily among speakers and sneezers in close encounters, touching a surface “isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.” Other scientists have reached a more forceful conclusion. “Surface transmission of COVID-19 is not justified at all by the science,” Emanuel Goldman, a microbiology professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, told me. He also emphasized the primacy of airborne person-to-person transmission.
(july 27) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hy...
"Hygiene theater", like "security theater", is focused on appearances rather than actual calculated risk.
I don't even disagree that much with you, Goldman, or the Atlantic article. Surface disinfection giving a false sense of security does seem like a major issue to me (and surface coatings and a number of other more extreme measures seem like a bad idea to me). However, I think you, the Atlantic author, and Goldman (unless misquoted, it seems he makes a different argument here than his Lancet article) are being unreasonably certain about it not mattering at all. It seems like the author could only find two people, both from Rutgers, willing to publicly support that argument. It seems like a pure ego thing to be so certain based on so little evidence and potentially quite harmful if not correct.
We don't hear about fomites anymore because it's awfully hard to encourage mask use when you tell people that the mask itself is a risk.
Everyone entering the country goes into an isolation facility (repurposed hotel) covid or no covid.
We would love to hear more about this. Do you have an article?
No one is getting banned from wearing medically approved PPE.
They are banning people who use 'body tents' (which take up way more space on an aircraft than just your body) and people who are trying to change the air around them (which is shared by other people, and therefore cannot be considered Personal, per the definition of PPE)
A more appropriate title would be: Airlines Ban Personal Tents and Air-Polluting Devises Now Popularly Marketed as Pseudoscientific Antiviral Protection
Of course phrasing it as such would remove the news worthy element and make it seem like the reasonable move it is.
In general, anything that potentially degrades the air quality for other passengers and does not have any provable benefit should be prohibited. Ozone is an obvious candidate, given that it will most likely make Covid spread more, not less.
Chance of crash ~0
Chance of death from disease, orders of magnitude more. Chance of death to family not on the flight of disease, even more orders of magnitude more.
Risk to airlines being sued for a crash ~ same with or without people tripping
Risk to airlines from regulators ~ a lot
As far as "mental illness," I'd prefer people go a little overboard than the opposite. If for no other reason than I am safer near someone in an airtight hazmat suit + respirator, whereas I am less safe near someone without PPE.
While I think the balance should be "reasonableness," they aren't hurting anyone else or even themselves. So live and let live.
Mandating everyone wear a full hazmat suit would be a far, far more reasonable policy than shrugging and letting people wear mostly-useless cloth masks. This is not a normal time and people have to stop acting like it is.
I've written a letter (I had to Fed-Ex it to get an answer) to United (my usual airline) and they tell me they have to allow CPAP in flight "because of ADA."
I hope they don't restrict the use of full-face masks.
Which is permitted by every airline including United and AA. Where did you get the impression that isn't the case?
Now, that's very unlikely to happen, but apparently that's more likely than catching COVID or something. (Really, it's just insurance stuff I assume)