Global Security Newswire

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is working with eight partners to research chemical and biological threats to airlines and other threats to cabin air quality, Kansas State University said in a release this week.

The Air Transportation Center of Excellence for Airline Cabin Environment Research opened in 2004 to study environmental health issues on airplanes, according to the release. That includes detection and decontamination of agents such as anthrax.

“How do you deal with an intentional attack if the attack is invisible — that is, what if somebody is releasing something into the cabin environment that cannot be seen — how can we even detect it? This is one of the things we’re looking at,” said KSU Engineering Experiment Stations director Byron Jones. 

Other project partners include Auburn University, Boise State University, Harvard University, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Purdue University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

“Our job is to protect the environment as best we can — detect, protect and clean up after it,” Jones said. “Whether an air incident is deliberate or accidental, the idea is the same and both are important” (Kansas State University release, summer 2006).