Airline cabin air quality is worse than before smoking ban (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Airline cabin air quality is worse than before smoking ban (2016)

traveller.com.au

Is there anything to back this up beyond a friend of the author of a letter to the editor?

Or anything to back up that air with a higher proportion of CO2 is "worse" than air filled with tobacco smoke?

Commercial buildings have CO2 sensors and minimum fresh air requirements. High levels of CO2 do cause problems for humans.

Here you go:

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media_file/202...

http://www.energy.wsu.edu/documents/co2inbuildings.pdf

Those links don't actually address the point I was making:

High CO2 levels may be bad, but it's a huge leap to go from there to saying that the air was better when it had cigarette smoke.

For that matter, both of your links say that CO2 levels below 5,000 ppm have no ill health effects other than perhaps drowsiness. And it looks like planes cabins are usually about 1,000-1,500 ppm -- elevated, but again, not clearly worse than having cigarette smoke in the air.

High CO2 levels is not only a problematic itself but an indicator of poor air circulation. You are breathing in other's expelled air. Catching/ spreading a virus like SARS‑CoV‑2, flu measles is an obvious "ill health" effect.

Pre smoking ban, regulation required airlines to change air more regularly (every 3 minutes I believe). Now they change it with half-new half-reused air.

From the article:

> They don't change the air as regularly, as it costs money to bring fresh subzero air in from outside and heat it to cabin temperature. By the time you reach your destination the percentage of carbon dioxide in the cabin from breathing is much higher than it should be.

No idea about the quality of this research, but if true 1350 +- 350ppmv carbon dioxide concentrations is, at minimum..., unpleasent air. I start opening windows at ~800. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1420326X1879399...

It's not exactly evidence, but I heard the same thing on QI. It's actually very difficult to find any information on this other than (what seems to me as) ads put up by airlines at different times (mostly 90s) to promote the idea that air quality is better now (presumably to cover up saving costs by using those half-packs.)

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