Airline Cabins Aren’t as Infectious as You Thought

A recent study found that catching the flu or other similar respiratory infections is more difficult for airline passengers sitting at least two seats away or in a different row from a sick fellow airline passenger.

According to a report about the study, “an infectious passenger with influenza or other droplet-transmitted respiratory infection will most likely not transmit infection to passengers seated farther away than two seats laterally and one row in front or back on an aircraft.”

According to a Georgia Tech website, the “FlyHealthy” study, conducted by researchers from Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, developed a model “that combines estimated infectivity and patterns of contact among aircraft passengers and crew members to determine likelihood of infection.”

During the study, in collaboration with Boeing Company, researchers looked at how airline crews and passengers interact in flight, placing observers on five roundtrip, transcontinental U.S. flights.

FlyHealthy team members also collected air samples and obtained surface samples from areas “most likely to harbor microbes.” They then “leveraged the movement data to create thousands of simulated flight scenarios and possibilities for direct exposure to droplet-transmitted respiratory diseases,” the Georgia Tech report said.

“We found that direct disease transmission outside of the one-meter area of an infected passenger is unlikely,” said co-author Howard Weiss, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

However, according to Weiss and co-researcher Vicki Hertzberg, Ph.D., a professor at Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, the activities of a passenger could change infection rates.

For example, Hertzberg said, around 40 percent of passengers never leave their seats, while another 40 percent get up once during the flight, and 20 percent get up two or more times. Approximately 80 percent of passengers in aisle seats got up during flights, in comparison to 60 percent of passengers in middle seats and 40 percent in window seats.

Researchers also tried to observe exposure to viruses that remain on surfaces such as airline seatback tray tables, seat belts and lavatory handles, as they also could transmit diseases.

Passengers and flight crews can eliminate the risk of “indirect transmission by exercising hand hygiene and keeping their hands away from their nose and eyes,” Weiss said.

Complete findings of the study are available in the journal called Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.