Passenger’s Nonstop Gas Turns 5-Hour Flight Into Febreze, Masks And Gagging — Here’s Why The Stench Never Cleared

Passengers couldn’t take the stench on a long flight, and it’s apparently someone’s seatmate that was causing the problem.

I need help understanding air filtration in airplanes. Someone apparently kept farting during the entire 5 hour flight, and everyone was suffering the whole time. The hostess started spraying Febreze and handing out masks because of it.

On passenger on a 5-hour flight “had insane gas every 15–20 min for [the] ENTIRE 5 hour flight,” and “the entire plane was gagging.” A flight attendant started spraying Febreze and handing out masks.

The woman taking video reiterates that this went on for the whole flight, and insists that because “the air being recirculated is a myth its bled in from the engines,” and if the smell never went away, then person “was farting on the regular.” In other words, they were refreshing the smell. Although I remember from men I was young, “he who smelt it dealt it” so maybe they were actually the perpetrator?

“New gorilla tactic to get people to mask again?”

“The hep filters prevent disease not farts or something like that.”

“Most have HEPA level filtration now but no charcoal for smells. There are no germs but it does stink.”

In fact, cabin air is usually about 50% fresh outside air (bled off the engines or compressed electrically) and 50% recirculated air that’s sent through HEPA filters. The total cabin air is typically completely renewed every 2 – 3 minutes (20–30 air changes per hour) at cruise.

Airflow is mostly top-to-bottom, not a big front-to-back breeze. That limits how far particles normally spread along the cabin.

However, while HEPA filters are excellent at removing particles (droplets, aerosols, dust, bacteria, and many virus-carrying droplets — typically 99.97% of particles), they do not remove most gaseous molecules, including many odor compounds. So it’s totally plausible that you can have:

• Good infectious-disease control (HEPA doing its job),

• Terrible smell when someone is venting sulfurous gas every few minutes, because the smell molecules sail right past the HEPA.

• Although some aircraft do have odor adsorber cartridges (carbon or similar) in parts of the system.

So given how fast cabin air is turned over, a smell that’s constant for 5 hours points mainly to continuous or repeated emissions in that part of the cabin. The ventilation will dilute each “event” in a few minutes, but if you keep re-seeding the air every 15 – 20 minutes, people near you are going to feel like it never ends.

Flatulence from goats once caused a Singapore Airlines aircraft to make an emergency landing. (Hot cows caused a similar issue for a 747 near Heathrow.) And a passenger’s gastrointestinal issues caused a British Airways flight to turn around and go back to London. And there’s the famous Delta diarrhea flight.

Someone had diarrhea on a delta flight from atlanta to Barcelona forcing the plane to land early #deltaflight #diarrhea pic.twitter.com/I8iFn542Yy

— Ding News (@DingNewsCorp) September 6, 2023

Usually things don’t reach the point where an aircraft has to declare an emergency, but passing gas on a plane is something that happens on most every flight, every day, because changes in air pressure cause the body to produce more gas.

• An average person does this 10 times a day anyway. Now multiply that out across a full widebody on a long haul flight and that’s without factoring in changes in altitude.
  
• The cause of the odor is sulfur
  
• The problem inflight is worse in cabins with leather seats (which traditionally meant first class). Most fabric seat covers are more absorbent.

Beans may be good for your heart, but you shouldn’t eat them before flying or on a plane. Avoid fried foods, cabbage, broccoli and brussels sprouts.

At Washington National airport, don’t do this:

Consider taking gas-x or beano if you’re especially prone to the issue. You can excuse yourself to the lavatory, but there’s often a wait especially in economy — this is to make your fellow passengers feel less awkward about the situation. The flipside though is if your seat mate passes gas, try to ignore it, it’s too easy for tensions to escalate in a plane as it is and there’s really nowhere to go to extricate yourself from an uncomfortable situation.