Health Onboard

by Airbus

Keep Trust in Air Travel

Building a resilient future for air travel

Following the COVID-19 crisis, Airbus launched the Health Onboard mission to strengthen the resilience of air travel against future pandemics. By learning from global challenges faced during this pandemic, this initiative focuses on creating a safer, more resilient air travel system, not only for aircraft but across the entire aviation ecosystem.

Working with all stakeholders – including ICAO member states, health organisations, airworthiness authorities, operators, and airports – Airbus is actively monitoring potential health threats using information available worldwide and assessing the global air transport system's actual resilience to those threats. Through this early warning system, emerging potential risks can be quickly identified.

This initiative also evaluates the resilience of the passenger experience, examining the currently available safety measures and identifying new ones that can be rapidly deployed or further developed as needed.

Our goal: to make air travel safer, no matter what the future holds.

Clean air and cabin

From the moment the aircraft is designed, optimum health considerations are taken into account in the cabin. This space is carefully constructed to ensure a safe and comfortable environment for all. As a gold standard, Airbus conducts regular simulation studies to maintain an optimal design of airflow in the cabin.

These simulations are robust – powered by computational fluid dynamics modelling – and provide highly accurate guidelines for the airflow, designed to remove the smallest particulates from the exhalation area of each passenger.

The simulations are frequently compared with actual onboard tests to ensure that the models match reality. Independent studies conducted by researchers from Harvard demonstrate that the airflow design onboard an aircraft is effective in removing contaminants to such a degree that it predominantly shows flying remains safe, or is even safer, than routine daily activities, such as going to the grocery shop.

Here is why the cabin airflow design provides optimised, clean air onboard an aircraft.

Clean air

We have leveraged innovation for decades to design a cabin environment that is safe for passengers and crew, ensuring they breathe clean air throughout their journeys.

The air in the cabin is renewed approximately every 2–3 minutes. It is a mix of fresh air drawn from outside and purified air from the cabin that has passed through highly efficient filters. These are known as High-Efficiency Particulate Arrestor (HEPA) filters, which remove more than 99.9% of particles present in the air, down to the size of microscopic bacteria and virus clusters.

Air enters the cabin through vents near the overhead bins, travelling downwards before being removed via vents in the floor. This strong downward flow prevents horizontal air movement within the cabin, reducing the risk of cross-contamination between adjacent seat rows.

The air is then either expelled from the aircraft or recirculated via the HEPA filters.

In other words, the cabin air is clean!

Making air travel safer

Clean cabin

Airlines perform thorough cleaning and disinfection routines to create a hygienic environment for everyone on board. Specialised teams use highly efficient approved products and methods to carry out disinfection of aircraft cabins, lavatories and their surfaces, crew rest areas, galley workspaces, and the cockpit.

Airbus provides airlines and operators with information on appropriate disinfection techniques – pre-flight – as well as guidance on the types of products to use in the aircraft.

In addition, we are engaging and exchanging with airlines and aviation partners to explore additional disinfection techniques.

New health safety measures in aircraft

EASA HEALTH project

This research project is expected to analyse scientifically proven measures to reduce the spread of infectious agents within the aircraft environment. In addition, risks associated with contact with contaminated surfaces will have to be addressed, including the impact that various disinfection and cleaning methods that are implemented by operators may have not only on initial-airworthiness aspects but also on continued-airworthiness aspects (source: EASA).

Airbus is supporting Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) in its application to this EASA project.

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