A320 Inadequate cabin air ventilation?
 

A fellow pilot has been struggling with cabin perception of inadequate cabin air ventilation in A319, 320 and 321. The issue is not cabin air contamination, but some of the flight and cabin crews feel that the ventilation is not enough. When packflow is then increased, the situation is perceived to get better.



They have studied the issue also with Airbus. The info they received from them was that this seemed to be pretty unique for our company and that they have not received other complaints on this issue.



In discussion concerning cabin air, this has not been an issue, and therefore we ask if your airline has been struggling with this issue? Also if theyve received any more info from Airbus.

Has anyone had headaches with pack flow Low that improved with pack flow normal.

Also Does your airline have ozone converter on your aircraft which can help air quality?

How often does maintenance have to check for CO and CO2, during flight?

thanks

What I would like to do is to buy a simple CO2 detector.
It could very well explain some of the symptoms that we're feeling.

For example : being abnormally tired or exhausted
Regularly when I board planes as a passenger, in a full cabin, I will sleep very easily. Even if I had a completely full night of sleep and whatever the time of day.

As far as I know, they never check for CO or CO2 and even told the guys who bought CO2 detectors that their data was worthless because the device was uncertified.

I don't think we ever check CO or CO2 levels in flight.

To save fuel, and therefore money; airlines use low airflow from the airconditioning packs whenever they can. Certainly this was SOP in the two main passenger airlines I was employed by.

In one airline; low pack flow was selected with fewer than:
115 pax A320. 140 pax A321. 200 pax A330

In another airline the figures for low pack flow were: 141 pax A320. 168 pax A321.

There are no CO2 monitors that I am aware of in any of the 8 commercial passenger aircraft types I have flown - there is only cabin altitude monitoring, which will produce cautions and warnings, and automatically drop the oxygen masks at certain cabin altitude limits.

On the A330; Mrs Uplinker, who was a purser, would quite often get one or several passengers feeling faint during long-haul flights. Sometimes they would be put on oxygen. When this happened, she realised that if she asked the pilots for high pack flow, the passengers would rapidly reccover. As a pilot, I learned to select high pack flow if a passenger was reported as feeling faint.

I believe - but cannot confirm - that the filters in the airconditioning ducts were not often cleaned or changed. This led to cockpits being very noisy as the air was forced through the partly blocked filters. And no doubt, a lower airflow to the cabin as well.

.

"No complaints from other airlines" - I have no Airbus experience, but some decades ago that was another airline builder's initial response to such things. Talking to other operators often established that the manufacturer was being slightly economical with the truth. So, don't take that as a final answer.

According to this link... https://aircraft.airbus.com/en/newsr...ortable-flight
HEPA filters are changed after "several thousand" flight hours.
I think many of the other simpler particulate filters are changed much more regularly but I'm honestly not sure of the time scale. An 'A' check would seem appropriate.

The mention of O3 is a good lead, I might add honestly...

Cleaning the filters should be part of the Maintenance Schedule and called up on a regular basis, it certainly was on the airline I worked for. Plus, what are pilots and cabin crew doing removing panels and did you record your actions in the appropriate log.