People and planes: Development of broadband EMC models of biological materials in aircraft

At microwave frequencies, an aircraft can be modelled as a multi-mode, reverberant EM environment. The presence of people on board will damp its resonances, thus lowering their Q-factors and increasing the propagation loss between two points. The relevant parameter is the mean absorption cross section of the body, which is of the order of one sixth of body surface area. For EM simulations of aircraft it is necessary to develop broadband numerical phantoms to represent the people on the aircraft. These should be at an appropriate level of detail somewhere between millimetre-resolution dosimetry phantoms and homogenous dielectric spheres.