Detecting infectious and biological contaminants aboard aircraft - Is it feasible?

The spread of disease via commercial airliner travel is a significant and realistic threat. To shed some light on the feasibility of detecting airborne pathogens a sensor integration study has been conducted in this work, in addition to computational investigations of the contaminant transport in an aircraft cabin. Our sensor study took into consideration sensor sensitivity as well as the size, weight and power of best available commercial off-the-shelf devices. Computational fluid dynamic simulations were made to investigate extreme coughing and sneezing scenarios. The principle finding was that contaminant concentrations in aircraft are below the sensitivity thresholds of current state of the art devices. Therefore, this study proposes the development of a novel bio-detector to achieve single particle detection limits for pathogen sensing in airline cabins.