You don’t need to wear the mask at all times, for example you can buy an air quality monitor, and wear the mask only when the sensors detect unsafe levels of contaminants (in which case your fellow passengers ought to be scared).
I live next to a liberally-polluting oil refinery so have looked into this a decent amount, and unfortunately there do not exist reasonably priced portable sensors for many (I’d guess the large majority) of toxic gasses. I haven’t looked into airplane fumes in particular, but the paper described in the WSJ article lists ~130 gasses of concern, and I expect detecting most such things at relevant thresholds would require large infrared spectroscopy installations or similar.
(I’d also guess that in most cases we don’t actually know the relevant thresholds of concern, beyond those which cause extremely obvious/severe acute effects; for gasses I’ve researched, the literature on sub-lethal toxicity is depressingly scant, I think partly because many gasses are hard/expensive to measure, and also because you can’t easily run ethical RCTs on their effects.
It’s quite easy to buy a air quality monitor that tells you about CO2 or CO but are there monitors that actually tell you about the 100 different substances that might be a problem on airplanes that you can easy have in your carry-on?
Professional handhelds that sniff broader leak byproducts (VOCs via PID sensors): ~$1,000–$5,700+. [...] A quick reality check: no single handheld will confirm every toxin the WSJ story worries about. CO meters only see carbon monoxide; PID‑based VOC meters are broad‑spectrum (good for “something’s leaking” signals) but not compound‑specific, so they won’t tell you which organophosphate or oil additive is present. Speciation usually needs lab analysis (e.g., GC/MS) or installed systems.
a monitor that detects VOCs generically maybe? Though possibly there cannot be generic VOC detector chemicals in the first place and I fell for marketing claims
You don’t need to wear the mask at all times, for example you can buy an air quality monitor, and wear the mask only when the sensors detect unsafe levels of contaminants (in which case your fellow passengers ought to be scared).
I live next to a liberally-polluting oil refinery so have looked into this a decent amount, and unfortunately there do not exist reasonably priced portable sensors for many (I’d guess the large majority) of toxic gasses. I haven’t looked into airplane fumes in particular, but the paper described in the WSJ article lists ~130 gasses of concern, and I expect detecting most such things at relevant thresholds would require large infrared spectroscopy installations or similar.
(I’d also guess that in most cases we don’t actually know the relevant thresholds of concern, beyond those which cause extremely obvious/severe acute effects; for gasses I’ve researched, the literature on sub-lethal toxicity is depressingly scant, I think partly because many gasses are hard/expensive to measure, and also because you can’t easily run ethical RCTs on their effects.
It’s quite easy to buy a air quality monitor that tells you about CO2 or CO but are there monitors that actually tell you about the 100 different substances that might be a problem on airplanes that you can easy have in your carry-on?
Edit: I asked ChatGPT 5-pro and it suggests:
a monitor that detects VOCs generically maybe? Though possibly there cannot be generic VOC detector chemicals in the first place and I fell for marketing claims