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.

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

Shouldn't a PRIMARY role of airport security to be to protect us from the mass indiscriminate violence of airline corporations?

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:

• hydrogen fuel planes
• electric aircraft

Though there is a decline in funding - probably due to the new right-wing administrations in the US and Europe.

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

Smelt it dealt it...