Hawaiian first U.S. airline on board for daily air quality monitoring

Hawaiian Airlines has become the first U.S. airline to begin daily air quality monitoring of one of the biggest and cleanest regions of the planet: an area from China to New Zealand to Seattle.

Since Oct. 23, Hawaiian’s A330 wide-body plane called Hokupa‘a (North Star) began making the first of 60 flights outfitted with $900,000 worth of air monitoring equipment, which uploads data from air samples that Hokupa‘a measures from the tarmac to cruising altitude.

“Without Hawaiian we have no other option for gathering the data,” said Andreas Petzold, vice president of the Brussells-based organization called IAGOS, or In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System, which now works with six carriers to measure air quality around the world. “This is a very important contribution by Hawaiian Airlines.”

The other airlines are Lufthansa, China Airlines, Air France, Cathay Pacific and Iberia.

All of the information is uploaded in nearly real time, Petzold said, and scientists are free to access it.

The data can be used to forecast an array of air situations — from bad air quality that could harm asthma sufferers to conditions that curtailed West Coast airport operations during recent brush fires, said Hanna Clark, IAGOS’ executive secretary.

The equipment aboard Hokupa‘a will measure air quality from the ground to 40,000 feet across a vast swath of the Pacific Rim — “one of the cleanest parts of Earth” — that includes Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Japan, China and American Samoa, Petzold said.

It will also measure air quality in other Hawaiian destinations including Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas and Portland, Ore.

Especially for the vast area that encompasses the Pacific Rim, “we do not have the full atmospheric picture,” said James Butler, director of the Global Monitoring Division for the Boulder, Colo.-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory.

The data coming from Hawaiian Airlines’ Airbus 330 “helps fill a gap,” Butler said.

The equipment aboard Hokupa‘a had only measured ozone and carbon monoxide until Monday, when it also began tracking water vapor, said Brad Chun, Hawaiian’s senior director of engineering.

Until it added Hawaiian Airlines’ Hokupa‘a Airbus 330, IAGOS said its air monitoring equipment had been aboard 17 planes that had made more than 13,000 flights since 2011.