I know this is fuck cars but planes are just as idiotic…
Planes aren’t “idiotic”. They are marvels of engineering and very useful for long distance travel, especially across oceans or difficult terrain (ever had to cross a mountain over a serpentine path?). Conceptually, planes are way less problematic than cars. There is no “plane centric lifestyle”, planes haven’t forced us to build our neighbourhoods differently, aren’t handed out to just about anybody, and aren’t killing thousands of people daily.
The problem is their engines. They are loud, polluting, and inefficient. Add on that they are unfairly subsidised with little to no incentive to improve besides lowering the weight on a plane. Let’s be clear though, planes pollute nowhere as much globally as cars. Planes were responsible for 2.5% of carbon emissions in 2020. Rice production alone is responsible for 1.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The airline industry hasn’t had to reinvent itself technologically since the 70s or so. But there is now work going into net-zero planes:
Though there is a decline in funding - probably due to the new right-wing administrations in the US and Europe.
Ultrafine particles are impossible to see and are often missed by conventional monitoring techniques, and therefore they are not covered by air pollution laws.
“It’s too difficult, waah” - Companies
When you sit in your seat and during take off or landing you can literally smell the fuel or its exhaust in the cabin, you have to be pretty dumb to think that the corporation that designed the aircraft has your best interests at heart … or that the airline company that now owns the aircraft will say anything about it.
Some airlines are better about it than others but I’ve been on some smaller aircraft and it’s amazing the sense of the air quality when you’re in your seat inside a sealed air compartment and you can still smell the engines.
I noticed that too! I went on my first plane journey a few years ago (Airbus A320 neo) and was concerned about the very kerosene-y smell while taxiing, but no one else seemed to be bothered by it.
Turns out the cabin air is just bypassed from the compressor, and when the plane is reversing, the exhaust goes back into the compressor and thus the cabin (my terminology may not be accurate). So it means the airplane manufacturers won’t even bother putting a proper air filter in their planes.
Shouldn’t a PRIMARY role of airport security to be to protect us from the mass indiscriminate violence of airline corporations?
HAH! Good one, prole!
Now get back in your seat, taps seatbelt sign. Oh, and by the way, you just earned this whole flight a special patdown.
An N95 mask keeps you from contracting whatever the person coughing three seats away is sick from, and apparently from breathing in ultrafine particles. :D
N95 is a lot better than naked, but you can go one step further and get a p100 which blocks 99.97% instead of 95% of ~0.3 microns particles . there’s also a 3M p100 with gas carbom filtration which works some gas fumes as well!
For sure, but I don’t think there are non-Breaking Bad, non-cartridge, P100s. 😆 There’s normalish N100s though. E.g. this Moldex.
Smelt it dealt it…
