I bet I won’t be able to. And I bet someone will have a lawsuit against an airline when they don’t answer.
This is the replace oxygen with nitrogen (“inerting?”) fix the FAA says will take 7 years to do.
You can certainly ask. If you will get an honest answer is another question.
Also if you get searched extra carefully due to terrorism concerns is another question (after all, you are interested in the explosive potential of the airplane)
Brian
Frankly, if the FAA is allowing seven years to do it, I don’t think any airplanes are going to be equipped with the inerting much before six years have elapsed.
To the best of my knowledge, the equipment doesn’t exist yet; so there’s the massive engineering effort of designing installations for every commercial jetliner, testing the equipment to make sure it’ll go 60,000 hours without a hiccup, manufacturing enough parts to retrofit the entire fleet, and installing the kits. Takes a lot of time. When mandating changes for which the drawings and parts already exist, the FAA usually allows the operators a couple years to comply (that is, to install the kit on all their airplanes). That means in this particular case they’re figuring on five years to design and build the things (and then two years for the airlines to comply), which means it’ll be six years before you start seeing them in any numbers out in the fleet.