Cosmic Radiations And Polar Flights

Today airplanes have made transportation fast and feasible for a normal middle class person. Right after commercial aircrafts flowing into industries, there have been many well established aircraft passenger services which reduces overall travel time in a much affordable rate.

Though these aircrafts have been highly useful to mankind and boomed manufacturing and service sector, yet there are some issues with these giant vehicles which need to be addressed. A lot of manufacturing units are used to make them and smallest of mistake in manufacturing of these vehicles can be very fatal.

One of the biggest such issues is fuel consumption. A general passenger aircraft like Boeing-747 can burn up to four litres of fuel in just one second! To the surprise, it is about 150,000 litres of fuel on a journey of ten hours. This is about forty per cent of the total weight carried by aircraft.

A more efficient system needs to be incorporated into passenger aircraft which could lead to better efficiency and reduced fuel consumption.

Smart algorithms and path planning is performed to find the shortest possible path between two places an airline has to travel in order to reach the destination without any inconvenience.

To avoid longer paths between two countries, many times flights move through the poles which falls much shorter as compared to when travelled through the equator.

Though this saves a lot of time and resources but since every coin has its flip side so does this. Polar flights are needed to travel at greater heights. Polar spots are the places where the magnetic field of the earth is moving inwards which is same as the flow direction of cosmic radiation.

Unlike EM waves cosmic radiations are matter waves and following Lorentz law, they tend to be deflected in an external magnetic field. But since at the poles, the magnetic field lines and cosmic radiations are falling in the same direction, the net magnetic force becomes zero and they aren't deflected easily.

Also, the atmosphere is very thin at those heights to shield these radiations and hence again overall shielding becomes almost equal to zero. Due to this cosmic radiation exposure is pretty high than that on other routes or ground.

This exposure can ionise the DNA bonds and cause permanent rupture of DNA which may lead to mutation and high enough dose can also cause cancer.These dosages are high enough that a pregnant woman carrying a baby in her womb is not allowed to travel through a polar route. The issue is dead serious and needs to be resolved as soon as possible since the exposure can be uneven at places which can cause any passenger travelling through the polar route into trouble unknowingly.

Since a lot of fuel and time is being saved and hence preference is given to these factors over a person's safety which up to a certain extent is correct but a better solution is still needed. Even NASA is working towards solving this problem by using composite layering which could carry or absorb these radiations.

Every year, polar routes are being modified such that the effect of dosage caused may fall into safe tolerable limits.

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