“Sunlight” Really Might Be The Best Disinfectant For Airlines Seeking To Attract Travelers Back Onboard

While most people around the world continue to sit at home awaiting the creation and approval of a vaccine against COVID-19 before they will travel again, the airline industry and other travel sector companies soon could have a new technology in place that could kill essentially all harmful germs on a plane over night, or even between every flight.

With air travel demand still down by around 80 percent from where it was 12 months ago, airlines in the U.S. and around the world are increasingly desperate to get their planes full once again. So far they’ve made it clear that step one in winning the wholesale return of travelers to the skies must be convincing them that it’s indeed safe – from a health perspective – for them to fly now.  That’s why consumers now are seeing, reading and receiving lots of video, print and digital messages from airlines and other travel companies discussing the details of their new cleaning regimes.

But such public relations campaigns that simply declare that flying is healthy once again are not, and never can be an effective substitute for physical steps taken to make planes and other public travel spaces 99.9 percent free of the microscopic bacteria and viruses – collectively and colloquially called “germs” – that cause dreaded diseases like tuberculosis, Typhoid, MRSA, Cholera, SARS, Ebola, norovirus, flu and, yes, coronaviruses like COVID-19. So carriers also are beginning to publicize both the new and long-standing cleaning practices they employ.

And now Honeywell,  a $40 billion-plus-a-year engineering conglomerate that makes a wide variety of advanced technologies and high performance materials for the aerospace and industrial buildings segments, is bringing to the market a new device about the size of an airline beverage cart that the company says can rid a plane of 99.9 percent of all such germs in less than 10 minutes. And, the company says, it can do it at a cost of less than $10 per single-aisle plane.

Honeywell has signed on to mass produce and market a device invented by Dr. Arthur Kreitenberg and his six-year-old start-up company Dimer LLC, in Los Angelese. Kreitenberg originally named the device the “Germ Falcon,” apparently because when its pair of long wing-like appendages are extended out over an airliner’s rows of seats as the machine is pushed slowly up and down the aisle it looks like a big mechanical bird.

Honeywell, however, is marketing it under the Honeywell UV Cabin System brand name, to emphasize what it is that the machine does. The “wings” of the battery powered device contain long light bulbs that emit ultra violet-C light that eradicates all germs on any surface, hard or upholstered, that those light rays touch.

UVC light is the shortest of three wavelength groupings within the ultraviolet light spectrum not visible to humans. While UV-A and UV-B light from the sun have long enough wave lengths to penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere and damage living cells – including human skin – living beings over time have developed some level of protection against light at those wavelengths. UVC light, however, cannot penetrate the atmosphere. Thus, living beings, including bacteria and viruses, have not developed defenses against it. So, the Honeywell-Dimer technology works by exposing all surfaces in the plane to UVC light.

Similar technology already is used in some hospitals to sterilize patient rooms and other areas. And a device using similar UVC technology has been in testing at Israel Aerospace Industries. But Honeywell is on tract to be the first to bring the technology to the airlines this summer.

“We’ll have the initial 10 units by the end of this month, and will be ramping up to full-scale production in July, August and September,” says Brian Wenig, vice president and general manager of Honeywell Aerospace’s Wheels and Braking Systems division. His division is manufacturing the UV Cabin System units in Olathe, KS.

Wenig declined to reveal the UV Cabin System’s unit price, but says in working with Dimer and refining the design to work most effectively inside the confines of a passenger aircraft, he’s confident that the system can effectively cleanse a narrowbody jet’s cabin in less than 10 minutes and do it for a cost of less than $10 per use. And that would include pulling in the arms and turning it sideways so it can clean a plane’s galley, and then extending one wing into each of the plane’s lavatories to kill all the bacteria and virus germs in there, too.

As of early this week Honeywell had yet to land its first sale. But Wenig says his team is taking a unit on a tour carriers’ headquarters around the world, where they are demonstrating the device’s capabilities and answering a lot of questions about its effectiveness, price, operating costs, complexity and maintenance.

Though the UV Cabin System’s effectiveness has not yet been certified by any health and safety organization, Wenig says “UV light has been used for decades in many applications: hospitals, water filtration systems and more. It is a very effective means for eliminating bacteria and viruses. It’s proven technology. What we’ve done is just to customize it for the aircraft environment.”

Given the more than 7,500 commercial planes in use prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Honeywell sees a very large potential demand for the UV Cabin System. But he’s not expecting a 1-to-1 ratio of planes to UV Cabin System units. Rather, he broadly places the likely demand at somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 units.

“The carriers we’ve talked to have suggested a ratio of one (UV Cabin System) per every four or five gates” at their hub airports. Beyond that, at smaller airports where carriers may use only one gate, or even just small handful of gates, another UV Cabin System unit would be required if the plan is to use it between every flight, he says.

An alternative approach would be have sufficient numbers of UV Cabin Systems deployed at those airports and maintenance centers where planes are parked over night so that the entire fleet could get a UV-scrubbing every night.

Wenig also said he could see airlines opting for a tag-team type approach by pairing UV Cabin System use between flights all day long with the use of electrostatic sprayers at night. A number of airlines already have begun “fogging” passenger cabins with chemical disinfectants applied using those prayers. Though he touts the UV Cabin System’s 99 percent effectiveness in killing germs, and the speed at which they can be used to sterilize a plane, he concedes the additional use of the fogging technique overnight (it takes time for the chemicals that settle on the seats and other surfaces to dry before passengers can be allowed onboard) could help allay any consumer concerns that UVC light might not get into every corner of a plane.

Still, even if those approaches definitively are proven to be effective, Wenig says there never can be a 100 percent guarantee that no passenger would ever contract a the virus that causes COVID-19 or other serious illnesses while on a plane. Even if the plane is totally germ free, once passengers begin boarding they bring with them any infectious germs they might have. In that case, airlines will have to continue relying on their cabin air filtration systems, which on the most modern aircraft models meet HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Arrestance) air filtration and purification standards, the use of face masks and other hygiene best practices, along with social distancing.

Currently, while demand for air travel is weak, most carriers are trying to avoid selling tickets for middle seats unless that middle seat is occupied by someone from the same household as the person seated next to them. But as demand rebuilds, that limitation is almost certain to give way because most carriers must fill more than 70 percent of their available seats just to break even financially. Yet one third of all seats on a single aisle passenger plane equipped with three seats on either side of the aisle are, by definition, middle seats.