Worried about catching a cold or the flu on an airplane? Get a window seat, and don't leave it until the flight is over.
That's what some experts have been saying for years, and it's perhaps the best advice coming out of a new attempt to determine the risks of catching germs on an airplane.
It turns out there's been little research on the risks of catching a cold or flu during air travel. Some experts believed that sitting in a window seat would keep a passenger away from infectious people who may be on the aisle or moving around.
For somebody who doesn't want to get sick, "get in that window seat and don't move," the study's lead researcher, Vicki Stover Hertzberg of Emory University in Atlanta.
The researchers did some mathematical modeling and computer simulations to determine how likely people were to come close to a hypothetical infectious passenger sitting in an aisle seat on the 14th row of a single-aisle airplane. They concluded that on average; only one person on a flight of about 150 passengers would be infected.
After a thorough observation, the study revealed that about 38 percent of passengers never left their seat, 38 percent left once, 13 percent left twice, and 11 percent left more than twice. Not surprisingly, a lot of the people getting up had an aisle seat. About 80 percent of people sitting on the aisle moved at least once during their flights, compared with 62 percent in middle seats and 43 percent in window seats. The 11 people sitting closest to a person with a cold or flu are at the highest risk. That included two people sitting to their left, the two to their right, and people in the row immediately in front of them and those in the row behind.
A lot of frequent fliers will be interested in the study's results, said Edward Pizzarello, an investor in a Washington-area venture-capital firm who also writes a travel blog."It's absolutely a fear I hear from people all the time. They just believe that they're going to get sick from going on an airplane, or they got sick from being on an airplane," he said.
Pizzarello said he's an aisle person, because he doesn't want to feel trapped in the window seat if he needs to get up.
