Mask Up: Forever Inflight?

by Robert McGarvey

It’s only been one year that we have been required to wear masks inflight – the initial federal mandate took effect February 1, 2021. The present federal mandate runs until mid-March and there is no knowing if the White House will extend it. But know this: more and louder voices are getting raised that suggest the mask mandate will become a permanent fixture.

Impossible?

Sure, the mask protesters may want to believe this is an impossibility – doubtless they believe it would be a violation of some fictitious right they claim. But I am beginning to think masks just may prove to be an inflight staple, not much different from the seatbelt (which we also are required to wear and have been since the early 1970s).

Incidentally, even into the 1950s arguments were made that seatbelts weren’t just superfluous inflight but dangerous. This Smithsonian article tracks that debate but of course belts won out and we have been wearing them for 50 years, at least for takeoff, landing and when flying through turbulence. Few voices speak out against this practice now.

Now, what prompts me to suggest that masks may become staples too? First there are statements by Dr. Fauci dating back to late 2021, where he said masks may be here to stay. He added: “Even though you have a good filtration system [inflight], I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.”

Now more voices are echoing this idea.

Neil Sorahan, CFO at Ryanair, told the Times of London, that masks would be ‘with us for a while longer to come’ and were a ‘small price to pay.’

Sorahan, who seemed to think the mask requirements will persist into summer, drew an analogy to the treatment of liquids, post 9/1/1 when, suddenly, we were forced to carry miniatures (and who didn’t toss a larger container or three into TSA bins?).

Multiple anonymous sources are also quoted in that Times piece saying masks will be with us for some time.

Arguably, too, another analogy is to the ban on smoking inflight which took effect, in stages, in the 1980s and was a clear-cut ban on smoking on domestic flights by 1990. There was indeed resistance to that ban – many smokers covertly puffed in lavatories, even after smoke detectors were installed and even today vaping apparently is commonplace inflight. But, bottomline, non-smoking became the norm on airplanes and even smokers learned to deal with it (chewing tobacco anyone?).

Personally, too, I am drawn to the idea of masks as a permanent inflight feature. For years I have dreaded long flights in the winter months (“the cold and flu season”) because, seemingly inevitably, I came down with a nasty cold that in my mind at least I blamed on the flight and the many pax who were sniffling and coughing. Was I right in that blame? Who knows. But research funded by Boeing a half dozen years ago – pre Covid – found that indeed diseases did transmit inflight but you have to be rather close to the infected person.

If we are all wearing masks, transmission of colds and flu and other respiratory diseases just might decrease.

What about those who insist masks are useless inflight? They have a point. Especially as carriers add more food service and of course beverage service. Lift the mask to take a swallow of water or beer and, yes, you are exposed to the virus risks in passengers near you and they are at risk for your viruses.

Lift to nibble that stroopwafel and ditto.

That just is fact.

But I nonetheless plan to wear masks inflight, at least until I go through a large box of 3M N95 masks that presently sits on my desk and, yes, I have relegated my cloth masks to recycling even though I rather like many of the cloth masks I have because they are quite comfy. But cloth just hasn’t proven effective with Omicron and many carriers, meantime, have banned many kinds of cloth masks. So I have switched to the higher grade masks and have even gotten accustomed to wearing them.

N95 masks are not the cure-all but I will be wearing mine with no stop date in sight.