BY JEC
Is bigger better? The new AT&T commercial with the man in a suit sitting on the floor with the kids seems to think so. Cruise ships, now they have gotten huge like Royal Caribbean’s new 5,000 passenger ships. With crew that’s 7,500 souls on board.
But we don’t do cruise ships very often, but a lot of us do fly and we can appreciate the aircraft industry for trying to keep up. Like Boeing’s 290 passenger 787 Dreamliner and its much larger cousin the Airbus’s 600 + passenger two story plane the 380 are doing their best to add seats and more passengers.
I’m on a Southwest flight with just 144 seats. All filled. Among the passengers are three small children. So far during this three and a half hour flight to Nashville at least two of the three have been crying, screaming at times. Then about two hours into the flight I thought I had climbed into a TB ward; passengers started coughing. A couple behind, a few in front, in time it seemed to grow to a chorus and I begin to wonder if the airlines resolved the air quality bio-filter issue.
You might remember; air filters that kill germs, help prevent those enclosed tubes from becoming contamination chambers. Come to think of it, we’re lucky if they pressurize the cabin to 7,000 feet instead of 8,000 (think deep vein thrombosis) so bio-filters I don’t think happened, but I’ll get back to you on that.
Consider the benefits to you the passenger of these ever expanding capacities. Imagine for a moment instead of two or three crying and screaming toddlers there’s seven or eight. How well can you tolerate fingernails on a blackboard and after two or three hours you’d be wishing you spent that $200 on the sound dampening Bose headphones. And now imagine the opportunity to contract that cold or flu on your flight to your vacation in say, Hawaii.
For me bigger is worse. Bigger offers an undesirable level of risk to my trip. What joy going to that business meeting the next morning trying to make the best impression between sneezes as the others at the table wonder what you brought to share. The enlarged cruise ships offer new greater opportunities to catch a Norovirus, be a victim of crime or stand in longer buffet lines. But cruise ships are discretionary; you really don’t have to get on a cruise ship.
Flying, though, is different. We’ve built a society around frequent flyer miles. Flying is almost mandatory. The wealthy can buy their way out of crowded planes, to a point. The rest of us though are left to the mercy of the designers and financial analysts who don’t see human beings but are focused on seat management. Less leg room, smaller seats, and that damn middle seat is still there.
I heard a rumor the airlines have been studying the old slave ship packing methods for new ideas on how to squeeze more bodies into the same space.
Are larger planes a better ride? Safer? They are technically more complicated and have more things that can go wrong. They take longer to load and unload, and are limited to certain airports and certain gates, but with twice or three times the number of passengers the odds of, well, an interesting experience increase.
Like the family across the aisle that brought their own liver and onion sandwiches – oh the smell (obviously not my favorite).
Or a flight on an Airbus 343 – a 300 + passenger jumbo – twenty minutes into the flight people sitting out of our view 120 feet up front started screaming. Nice jolt of adrenaline. A minute of getting scared and watching the fear spread. Condensation coming from an air vent was confused for smoke. And respiratory conditions watch out for that air quality.
Come to think of it, everyone has an interest. I mean people, ah well, we do gases. Experts say the average person releases about two quarts of intestinal gas a day. Yes, that’s right, farts. Confess, you know you do it; we all do it, we have to do it. Mixed with the sneezes and coughs and burps and belches there are farts. Put 300 people sealed inside a tube for say six hours and what could you expect? About 150 quarts of farts blended together; breath deep.
So Boeing, Airbus, give us flying public safer, comfortably small fuel efficient planes. Because screaming kids and sick people and farts will always be with us.
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That’s the problem with public transportation in general whether it’s a bus, a train, a trolley. You’re in a confined space with somebody who is transmitting the flu or some other virus. That’s the advantage of private transportation. In your own car all you have to worry about is your own germs. We would all be better off with respect to carbon emissions if we used public transportation, but public transportation would have to do a better job filtering out germs, and individuals should do a better job filtering out their own germs like the Japanese do who wear those masks when they have a cold.
Drugs.
And imagine, we used to be able to smoke on planes – geez! Yeah, I was guilty. Thanks JEC for the visuals but I did get a chuckle.
“Are larger planes a better ride? Safer? They are technically more complicated and have more things that can go wrong.”
That’s not necessarily true. The Airbus 380 has four engines, as does the Boeing 747. However the Airbus 300 and Boeing 777, 787, and 767, all wide bodied airliners, have two engines like their narrow bodied counterparts. (like the 757)
That’s really the measure of how many systems and redundant backups there are within an airframe design to worry about failure. The size of the plane, whether you look at passenger capacity or max gross takeoff weight, is largely irrelevant.
Interesting article though and there are tangible points that reflect upon statistics and odds- like the odds of having someone with an exotic strain of flu booked on a flight of 150 VS 300. Since the floor plans of the decks aren’t that different you’re not much further away (could I say “within spitting difference”?) on the large plane than the small one from the sick guy. We could more or less assume a 2:1 risk reduction.
About the same as the statistics will end up being if, all else being equal, we operate with aircraft carrying 300 vs. 150 in accident fatality rates for similar type aircraft. That’s right, 2 planes operating on the same route vs. 1 are going to lead to twice as many accidents and deaths over the long haul. The risk to the individual (you or I just trying to get from point A to point B) seems on the surface to be the same but it’s not. We have 300 people who went from point A to point B with two flight crews going through the same tasks with potential for error as could have been done with one. Two machines with parts at risk for failure instead of one.
Just some food for thought. Hopefully stored safely refrigerated for safe consumption by crew and passengers. (in “Airplane” wasn’t it the fish that made them sick?)
Finally another point of risk is, believe it or not, ease in egress regarding aisle access in situations of fire or ditching in water. The definition of wide bodied aircraft is two aisles, narrow body have one. Your “smaller” aircraft with a worst case but common deck layout of a single aisle and two rows of three seats each has a painfully slow egress situati0n.
A wide bodied aircraft with two aisles and some combination of 7 to 10 seats wide is even in the worst combinations less passengers per seat row.
While catching a cold may seem like misery I don’t think that “burning to death because you were stuck behind slow people who chose their carry on over life” is terribly attractive. This Boeing 737:
took about 2 minutes to go from safe operation to fully engulfed.
John, ok, today’s world – stuck in the serious. You skip over one or two variables; number and age of aircraft, who’s flying (and maintaining) those aircraft. Bigger is more complicated, more meters of wire, more pumps, tubing, weight and more expensive to maintain/park/fuel, etc. Are all engines created equal? Seriously no. Planes have different glide capacities; the 777 can take off with a single engine that’s the size of the 737 body – build a better bird catcher. Do you think the design choices are selected for safety and comfort or profit? I’m pretty sure profit wins in America. I’ve seen a nice design for a two aisle 2 x 4 x 2 (2 x 2 x 2 in first class) – 24 seats in first, 200 seats in coach, no bulkhead seats, six heads (2 reserved for first) two engine lift body with 26 inch aisles and two main exits one associated with a lounge (open) space for stretching the legs. Wonderful design, very appealing. What happened? No market, wasn’t developed. Go figure. Hopefully you got thinking about air quality and the safety associated with the health of the passengers. Thanks.
Is it true that, aside from communicable disease, air quality is an issue that affects frequent flyers more than infrequent?
On the Dreamliner I believe I read here: that the composite fuselage sections, compared to the all aluminum construction of past designs, does not suffer from fatigue stress and the resulting cracks and they are able to provide passengers with higher pressurization and humidity levels, increasing comfort. Of course there’s that little lithium ion battery thingy. You might find that article interesting, it’s a no less than scathing critique of Boeing’s management regarding development of the 787.