ing to try it. Walters said he’d find out and call back.
For 15 minutes, Dent didn’t leave the porch. He
drank his beer, and he looked out at the trees as gloom
accumulated underneath them. Maybe it would all go
away, he thought.
But then Walters was on the phone again: “I’ll have
the world at your place on Tuesday.”
(Literally) Containing a PlagueIn 2007, when the CDC first asked Phoenix Air to
build the containment system, they had wanted it to
transport patients with diseases like Avian Flu and
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, back to
the U.S. from international outbreaks. SARS can pass
from person to person through droplets of moisture
in the air. Anyone who’s ever caught a cold on an air-
plane can imagine how tough such a disease would be
to contain in a closed cabin. To build the Aeromedi-
cal Biological Containment System (ABCS), Phoenix
Air had employed CDC and Department of Defense
engineers who handled samples of the most threat-
ening diseases and chemicals on earth.
The ABCS consists of a frame of metal tubing con-
toured to fit inside an airplane’s fuselage, supporting
a disposable plastic cocoon—a giant zippered sock
made out of what looks like a double-thick shower-
curtain liner. Everything inside the sock is dispos-
able, including a stretcher, a bucket toilet, medical
supplies, and leads for health monitors that can be
operated by the medical crew from outside. To reach
the patient area, a member of the medical team must
walk from the sterile area of the plane through an
air-lock-style antechamber, where she dons protec-
tive gear in a specific order with the help of a check-
list and an advisor on the outside. A custom-built air
pump creates a negative air pressure gradient from
the main aircraft cabin, through the antechamber,
and into the patient chamber. A virus floating in the
air is pulled backward, into the sock’s figurative toes.
In most pressurized aircraft, the air you breathe is
sucked in from the engines and introduced through
vents all over the cabin. To maintain air pressure,
some air leaves the cabin through a baffled outflow
valve usually located near the cockpit. This outflow
valve is on the opposite end of the plane from the toe
of the sock, and would therefore act in opposition,
airflow-wise, to the air pump protecting the crew
from disease. In the modified corporate jet that flies
the ABCS, Phoenix Air sealed the outflow valve up
front and installed a new one in an unused luggage
compartment in the rear, running the plane’s airflow
backward, through the gradient of the sock, and out
@PopularMechanics _ July/August 2019 87