More About the Air Travel

A flurry of messages about my most recent post suggests I should tell you more details about my travel across the Pond.

Ground Transport

Normally I take public transportation to and from the airport. This time, due to labor strikes, that wasn’t practical.

Before I say more about my travel arrangements, please know that I support the striking workers. They are doing what they must. Their fight is about more than pay. On the trains, for example, management is pushing to get staffing down to just the driver and no longer have a guard or conductor on board. That would be unsafe. The strikes are to protect the public as much as to protect themselves, so I have no complaints about the strikes.

The airport transfer driver I engaged wears a face mask.

Air Transport

My flights were on Singapore Airlines. They fly Airbus, so there’s no chance of getting a Boeing 737-MAX no matter how that machine gets renamed. Their service is flawless. It is actually a pleasure to fly with them, even in economy seats.

As I mentioned, cabin crew wear masks throughout the flight. They wear disposable gloves when serving consumables.

The HEPA air filtration I mentioned runs so fast, it processes the entire volume of the cabin every 2 to 3 minutes. Twenty turnovers per hour is hospital grade or better.

Studies have found that even on a more typical airplane, if you wear a good face mask, you have good odds of getting through the flight without picking up an airborne infection. What scuppers your odds? If someone within a couple of seats of you in any direction is sick and spreading an airborne disease (think: unmasked and coughing or sneezing), your chances of catching it go up a lot. Even the best face masks can’t filter out absolutely every particle.

Taking a flight was a gamble, even on Singapore Airlines. Now you know exactly what the variables in the gamble were.

Economy versus Business Class

The last time I flew business class had been decades ago. I’d love to always have that level of comfort, but it’s expensive.

Except when your flight is on New Years Day and the flight is abnormally light, so you can upgrade with membership points.

I had forgotten that business class passengers get access to a posh lounge for the wait between going through security and boarding the airplane. I was very much out of my element, in a nice way.

Guess what? Business class travelers are more likely to wear face masks than economy class travelers. High quality masks.

Until they enter the lounge, at which point most of them remove the masks. They put the masks on again before going out into the airport to catch their flights.

It was beautiful, quiet, spacious, comfortable. My nose isn’t sensitive or even reliable, having grown up amid oil refineries and decided that a good sense of smell was pointless. But even to my lazy nose, the business class lounge smelled better than the rest of the airport. It has cleaner air. Maybe this is why most of the others in the lounge remove their masks. (You know me, so you aren’t surprised that I kept wearing mine.)

When I first got there, it also wasn’t at all crowded. More people came in as the morning went on, but even then, it wasn’t as crowded as the rest of the airport.

Lovely food and drinks were available. I didn’t have much, and I used the same technique that I use to eat or drink during a flight. It’s from a doctor who has to eat lunch in her hospital’s busy cafeteria. I’m sure it looks ridiculous, although no one has bothered me about it. Mastery has taken some practice.

In essence, I take in a good breath, move the mask to take a bite or a sip, then exhale as I put the mask in place again so it is somewhat cleared out. Try it and you’ll feel as silly as I do, but I’m willing to look silly if it will help to protect me.

The restrooms were immaculate and individual, not multi-cubicle. I even could have taken a shower!

At the departure gate and on the flight, passengers for Singapore Airlines are more inclined to wear face masks than at most other airline gates I passed. Business class passengers are more inclined to wear masks than economy passengers. I counted, and in business class the majority wore masks… to board and to deplane.

During the flight, some of the other business class passengers removed their masks. I don’t recall seeing that happen among economy class passengers on my first flight. Business class was sparsely populated, so people weren’t too close to each other.

Even in business class, masks came off only when we were in the air. When we landed, masks were on again to deplane.

The HEPA air filtration on airplanes usually doesn’t kick in while the airplane is at the gate and using power from the airport. It operates when the airplane is running on its engines. If no one near you on the flight is coughing and you want to take your chances by relying on air filtration for a while, the time to do it is in flight, when air filters are fully operating and have had some time to “turn over” the cabin air a few times during taxi and take-off.

Last Note

There never has been a perfectly safe way to travel, but airborne disease has become more of an issue than it used to be. At the moment, COVID isn’t the only one to consider. I wouldn’t want to bring my mother or my aunt flu either, for example.

I’ve given you all of these details in case you have been weighing the risks of air travel in a pandemic versus whatever travel you want to do that would require flying. Some of you are going through that thought process now.

If I included more of my thoughts and opinions about what I observed and experienced, we’d be here for ages. But here are enough details, I hope, for you to have a reasonably clear picture of what you would get into if you fly right now on an especially safety-conscious airline. (Expect less masking and less air filtration as you move down the quality ladder.)

May you have a safe, healthy, happy 2023.