Travellers puzzled by Safair ‘middle seat’ fee

I used to fly a lot for work — three weeks out of four on average. It was tiring and annoying a lot of the time, but how I miss all my airport rituals now — chatting to the shoeshine guys, the Friday evening drink in the airport lounge and the camaraderie among strangers on a plane.

Lockdown put a sudden end to all of that but, almost three months on, business travellers will soon be able to make their way to airports, only this time they will need a lot more than a boarding pass and an ID just to enter the terminal building.

The checklist now includes a mask, a permit for work travel and a written declaration that you haven’t had a fever or cough in the previous 14 days.

Airports will be much emptier — no leisure travellers, and no family and friends saying fond hellos or farewells. Travellers will have to keep their mask on — covering both mouth and nose — for the duration of the flight. There will be no catering, with the exception of water.

I had assumed that physical distancing would be a must, as in other forms of public transport, but transport minister Fikile Mbalula said : “full capacity will be allowed”.

Well, almost full — the last row of seats at the back of all planes will be reserved for those who fall ill during a flight.

“The risk of Covid-19 on board a commercial passenger airline is lower than in many other confined spaces ... because all our commercial aircraft are fitted with Hepa (high efficiency particulate air) filters which eat all the viruses inside the aircraft,” the minister said.

Then came FlySafair’s announcement that the middle seat could remain empty, for an extra fee of R750.

The original intention, FlySafair’s VP for sales and marketing, Kirby Gordon, said, was to enable travellers to simulate a business class seat by paying extra to avoid having to fight for armrest space with the middle seat occupant, but Covid-19 provided another reason for the airline to give their passengers that option. A limited number of their planes will take to the sky on June 15.

“FlySafair, do not try to make the money you guys lost with these ridiculous prices and stupid R750 ... you want people to pay for social distancing,” @GysmanTess tweeted.

In a discussion on the issue with Gordon on 702 last week, caller “Albert” said if he chose to pay an extra R750 to keep the middle seat empty, the person who bought the aisle seat would benefit.

“No,” Gordon said. “That passenger will also pay R750.”

“What? Sell the same seat twice?” show host Azania Mosaka asked. Yes.

Mbalula has reportedly said he does not support FlySafair’s seat blocking policy as it was not government policy, nor was it contained in the regulations.

“It’s a marketing strategy for those who don’t trust the Hepa,” he was quoted saying.

I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering how a Hepa filter could help if someone sneezed or coughed right next me, with an ineffective or ill-fitting mask, bearing in mind that a single cough releases about 3,000 droplets, travelling at 80km an hour, and a sneeze releases 10 times that many, travelling four times that speed.

If a person is infected, the droplets in a single cough or sneeze may contain as many as 200 million virus particles which can be dispersed into the environment around them.

That viral information is courtesy of Dr Erin Bromage, associate professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

According a BBC News report, the chief engineer at aerospace giant Airbus, JeanBrice Dumont, argues that the way modern aircraft are designed means the air is intrinsically very clean.

“Every two to three minutes, all the air is renewed by passing through those Hepa filters. That means 20-30 times an hour the air around you is completely renewed.”

But Dr Julian Tang, consultant virologist at the Leicester Royal Infirmary and associate professor at Leicester University, was quoted as saying that while Hepa filters did work, they could not capture all Covid-19 droplets or aerosols before you might breathe them in.

He is part of a team which published a study looking at minimising the airborne transmission of Covid-19 in enclosed spaces.

“Filtration only works on mass airflows. But most of the transmission during a plane journey will be those shortrange face-to-face conversations. Close-range aerosol transmission is what you have to be worried about on a plane, train or bus,” Tang said.

“If you’re sitting next to somebody on a plane in economy class who’s coughing and sneezing, that aerosol will reach you before it has time to reach the filtration system, get filtered and come back down again.”

Which suggests that if you do find yourself sitting right next to someone on a domestic flight any time soon, and one of you is infected but asymptomatic, there’s rather a lot riding on your cough-sneeze etiquette and the efficacy of your masks.