Editorial

It has been said that the greatest danger from aircraft is not them being deliberately flown into buildings, hijacked, flown by suicidal pilots or mistakenly shot down, but the fact that they so easily bring illnesses across borders, the most recent example being COVID-19 or Coronavirus, of course. However, there is another deadly side to aircraft – emissions of toxic pollutants, particularly the sulphur in jet fuel, which reportedly kills thousands of people a year. A study by aeronautical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that globally about 8,000 deaths per annum result from pollution from planes at cruising altitude — about 35,000 feet (10,668 metres) — whereas about 2,000 deaths result from pollution emitted during take-offs and landings. In India, for example, there are an estimated 1,640 deaths per year from airplane emissions — about seven times more deaths than would be expected based on the number of flights that start or finish in the country. Most of these deaths are caused not by flights over India but from emissions in Europe and North America at high altitude, which then blow across Asia, according to a study, published by EnvironmentalScience&Technology magazine. When a plane flies at cruising altitude above the clouds, wind currents can whisk the pollution far away so that prevailing winds cause the pollution to fall from the sky about 10,000 kilometres to the east of the plane's route. The United States, therefore, incurs about 450 deaths each year from airplane emissions — only about one-seventh the number of deaths that would be expected if the pollution fell straight to the ground from planes, the study said. Horrifically, however, those deaths are hugely overshadowed by the number of deaths caused by emission from ships – a whopping 60,000 a year, according to ES&T.