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Comment by johnnyfaehell | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, this seems reasonable. There has to be a line that is drawn. Having everyone wearing full body pods isn't feasible.

If you honestly feel like you need a full body pod, maybe you should seek a different mode of transport.

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There's a bunch of eager grandparents looking forward to seeing their first grandchild born, as well as loved ones going to funerals etc. These people trend towards being over 55 and a cross country solo road trip for a widowed grandmother is not always an option for them, and covid isn't going to stop them from getting on a plane if possible.

Most air travel is for a good reason, and most of it is avoidable in the current environment. There are other ways to see a grandchild or pay respects to the deceased. It sucks, but we're all in the same boat

I've a parent that died just before COVID started and I'm not allowed to go there (travel ban).

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.

A grandparent who wants to visit a newborn is the epitome of "neither of you should travel". It's like people don't even consider the option of actually adjusting their expectations based on changed world conditions. Easy for me to say, of course, since I live far enough away from my family that I've already become used to missing funerals and weddings and babies, and now I couldn't go home if I wanted to.

Not to mention the egress issues large safety equipment might cause. I can’t imagine an emergency deplane where everyone is effectively in inflatable sumo suits.

This is a reasonable position, assuming you're also in favor of banning obese people from flights.

There's a difference between people's own weight which they can't easily control or change and excessive personal protection which can be swapped for a mask and a bottle of hand sanitizer.

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.

I think the concern with the pods is different from large body mass. The pod gets tossed (presumably) in an emergency situation so it can end up somewhere that is blocking someone else from safely evacuating.

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.

> Having everyone wearing full body pods isn't feasible.

How is someone wearing a full body pod in a window seat (as pictured in the article) causing problems for others?

I'm guessing it's a safety thing? Having a bunch of people in bubble suits would make it really hard to evacuate the plane.

Wouldn't this be a simple case of measuring the probability of needing to evacuate the plane quickly vs. probability of catching covid-19 and dying?

Honestly, right now, for an elderly person, the covid risk is probably higher.

Conditional probability is a bit too advanced for the people making these decisions at the moment.

(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.)

Isolating at home is a good way to stay safe if vulnerable.

..from both eventualities!

Theoretically you could, but in practice I don't know that we can reliably determine either of those probabilities with any accuracy. For instance, COVID risk is highly dependent (even for elderly people) on the presence of comorbidities. Are you going to ask everyone on the flight for their medical history?

I understand, but surely someone with an actual stats background could do a basic calculation on number of recent plane crashes vs. some estimated probability of N people out of 100 on a plane having COVID * the overall mortality rate, etc.

Yes but I would be frightfully annoyed if my own evacuation from a burning plane was impeded by someone’s unproven attempts at trying to lower their COVID risk.

And what is the marginal benefit of going full pod vs everyone simply wearing a mask?

Mask is marginal as well with very weak scientific evidence yet people wear it and even have to.

Isn't it a slippery slope though?

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.

(This is HN, so I fully expect an airport buff to point out that 'spoons is a British chain, and no British airport that flies to Magaluf has a Wetherspoons, except for one month in 2014 when a code change coincided with the grand opening of the Lands End airport Wetherspoons, or something - in fact I encourage it.)

I love that all the names of these places sound to me (as an American) like they could be mythical places out of Game of Thrones or something. Magaluf and Wetherspoons at Lands End? Amazing

Ha, well I'm sorry if it's a partial disappointment, but Magaluf is a Spanish holiday destination for, stereotypically, drunk-before-they-get-there British yobs; and Wetherspoon's (aka 'spoons') is a large (down-market) pub chain (proprietor J D Wetherspoon).

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.

Part of the reason is included in the statement: "Advise them that 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"

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.

If the cabin suddenly depressurizes, good luck grabbing an oxygen mask through that thing.

If everyone needs to evacuate the aircraft in the event of a fire, moving down the aisle wearing a tent, without the use of hands, is going to be less-efficient.

If someone plugs up the emergency exit, someone else stays stuck inside the plane.

It's a safety issue: "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"

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.

But there's not even an attempt to compare risk quantitatively. Cabin depressurization events are extremely rare, and deaths from people who don't manage to put on the mask (which will exist on every plane) are rarer still. This is a known, negligible risk, while covid is an real and still difficult to bound risk. Passengers should be allowed to make that decision themselves.

(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.)

Cabin depressurization is extremely rare, but that doesn’t stop the mandatory safety briefing every flight does while taxiing

FTA:

> 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.

If there's cabin decompression and people need to put on oxygen masks quickly to avoid passing out, that tent is going to be a significant hindrance. While it probably won't kill anyone other than him, that's still a major liability for the airline. Just like not wearing your seatbelt is unlikely to harm anyone else but the airlines can still require it, the airlines can force people to limit things which would interfere with their own safety while in the airline's care.

Evacuation doesn't work as smoothly, for one. But more importantly: if healthcare workers people can work inches from ICU patients on ventilators and HFNC's that spray virus particles far and wide, and use only masks and googles/shields, then I think a person in an airplane seat will be fine using the same PPE.

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,...

> if healthcare workers people can work inches from ICU patients on ventilators and HFNC's that spray virus particles far and wide, and use only masks and googles/shields

Healthcare workers do, in fact, become infected with COVID-19 at unacceptable rates.

The number of infections per hour of exposure is still quite low, and likely very much acceptable for an individual for the travel scenario. The infection risk on a plane is tiny compared to an ICU.

Because recent news items on plane evacuations, when the thing has literally been on fire, have reported that people will delay to collect their carry on luggage despite it being strongly and explicitly forbidden. Therefore expecting Mr Tent to patiently wait by the window for everyone else to leave first seems like a bit of a stretch.

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