This thread started with an amount of Former Chief Spirit citing a Business School study claiming that flying was relatively safe, even with the middle seat occupied. Of course, everyone was wearing masks, etc.
Alright, now assume we are just talking about aerosols. An effective dose will follow a formula like time(minutes) = (distance from source/n)^3
Where n is the distance at which someone would inhale an effective dose in one minute.
Doubling the distance to an emitter will increase eight-fold the time needed (this is your cube-root problem).
Now, in a pandemic with documented cases of transmission on airplanes, and with a clear public health interest that would facilitate data collection, why are the players in the industry citing hypothetical studies rather than investigating actual cases of transmission, explaining their mechanism, and the countermeasures they have put into place?
Why should we trust a model when we've got plenty of empirical data that seems to say otherwise, but which the modelers completely ignore?
Finally, here's the bad news: the point of business travel is to exploit the value of personal meetings: face-to-face discussions, informal discussions over meals, meeting team members. If, for health reasons, the flight requires masks, restricts meals to a minimum, and discourages unnecessary interaction, then the destination will as well. Then there's no business case for most business travel.