It's Mostly Safe to Fly During the Pandemic

Misbar’s investigation has discovered that the risk of contracting COVID-19 on an airplane is fairly low. In a study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health, it was determined that: “With mask wearing and aircraft ventilation gate-to-gate, COVID-19 transmission onboard an aircraft is below that of other routine activities during the pandemic such as grocery shopping or eating out.” While some are critical of the study because it was financed by an airline trade organization, the findings and recommendations of the report were the independent conclusions of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health which included experts in industrial hygiene, infectious disease, engineering, environmental, medical, social sciences, and crisis leadership.

A different flying and COVID-19 study was published in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. This study was designed to test aerosol dispersion in an airplane cabin. Researchers determined through transmission model calculations using measured aerosol breathing zone penetration data that there is an extremely unlikely aerosol exposure risk for a 12 hour flight. The researchers summarized: “The data from this study indicate that the airplane environment significantly reduces the exposure to aerosol generated by passengers, especially compared to other indoor environments.”

Another consideration is that if flying was not safe, one would expect rates of infections for pilots and flight attendants to be higher than average. However, according to the largest flight attendant union in the U.S. to ABCnews.com, they have seen a little over 1,000 flight attendants across the industry contract the novel coronavirus. That’s less than 1 percent of the roughly 120,000 flight attendants employed. The current positivity rate for COVID-19 in the U.S. is above 3 percent according to the CDC. 

Overall, any activity involving other people will carry a risk in an infectious disease pandemic. However, the science available to date has shown that flying is a relatively low risk activity due to airline cleaning, passenger mask wearing, and the processes used to filter the air in the plane’s cabin.