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This paper reviews reportable aviation incidents and associated cost losses. Aviation incidents include visible smoke incidents inside aircraft passenger cabins, occurrences of fumes and oily smells, and illness cases reported by flight crew members in 2012, for US based carriers for domestic flights and all international flights that either originated or terminated in the US. Cost losses include direct and indirect costs endured by different airlines due to diversions from the scheduled flight route, returns to departure airport, expedited arrival procedures, and cancellation of flights on ground. Two case study scenarios are presented to illustrate minimum and maximum costs limits. Sources used to collect data for this article include the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Aviation Administration online database, Research and Innovative Technology Administration database (RITA), and official airline websites.

An experimental study was performed in a mockup of a Boeing 767 cabin section consisting of eleven rows with seven seats per row. The ventilation system for the mockup is constructed for actual aircraft components and includes linear diffusers that extend the full length of the mockup. Ventilation flow rates representative of an actual aircraft were used for all experiments. Seats in the mockup were occupied by thermal manikins to simulate passenger heat load. A motorized beverage cart traversed the length of the right aisle. Tracer gas and smoke visualization were used to determine the effect of the moving cart on transport of contaminants in the cabin. Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) tracer gas was injected at a constant flow rate at a location adjacent to the aisle until concentrations in the cabin reach steady-state.

Numerous thermal models have been developed for the human body. Most of them are only for the nude person. Without applying clothing, the human thermal models have very limited uses. In this paper, a comprehensive numerical model was developed for the coupled transport of energy and mass through the human ensemble system. In the development, not only has attention been paid to the theoretical relations between heat and moisture in the ensemble system, special attention has also been paid to the integration between the human and clothing thermal models. The model was developed such that clothing can be easily applied to the human thermal model the way people put their clothing on. Since the model is integrated with a human thermal model it is applicable in a wide range of real life applications. Model predictions and experimental results were compared for a variety of transient environmental exposures.

A unique measurement device, called StickMan, and a customized vehicle climate control system, were developed to measure thermal comfort under transient and non-uniform conditions inside vehicle. The systems were fully calibrated and then used to characterize the vehicle thermal environments (air temperature, radiant temperature, air velocity, relative humidity) at 20 locations. Coupled with a seventeen segment version of the human thermal model TRANMOD (Jones and Ogawa, 1992), one can predict both whole body and local thermal sensation accurately based on the StickMan measurements. Therefore, using a device such as StickMan may reduce the design cycle and costs by eliminating the need of large number of human subjects to evaluate thermal comfort satisfaction in vehicle prototypes.