It's no secret that despite increased pandemic-instated sanitation practices and clean downs, airplanes are notoriously not the cleanest of spaces when passengers are on board.
Regardless of distancing and using your own precautions, having dozens of people in one confined space for a long period of time lends itself to higher risk of contracting germs.
But while some precautions might seem obvious (wipe down the tray table with a sanitary wipe, avoid touching door handles, etc.), one flight attendant is making waves by sharing one thing you should never do on an airplane that most of us probably haven't ever thought about.
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Tommy Cimato, a flight attendant who has amassed a following of over 108,000 on TikTok, shared one of the five most unsanitary things you can while riding an airplane: wear shorts.
Yes, it's true!
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♬ Blue Blood - Heinz Kiessling & Various Artists
The video, which has now been viewed over 3.3 million times, goes through a list of five behaviors to practice on board, which include drinking 16 ounces of water per flight, not touching the flush button in the bathroom with your bare hands and not sleeping on the window.
All of these seem relatively reasonable when thinking about the germ-risk, but Cimato explains that wearing shorts and leaving your legs exposed to the seats are just as risky.
"Don't or try not to wear shorts when you're on an airplane. It's the same thing as the window, you never know how clean it's going to be," he says in the video. "So if you have pants, you're gonna have less germs."
The post has garnered over 462,000 comments with many questioning whether or not Cimato's tips mean that airplanes aren't always properly sanitized.
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"So u guys don't clean it after each flight," user Criss Carrillo questioned.
"So you're basically saying you don't clean/sanitize the plane after every flight," another user wrote. "Got it."
Cimato did respond to one user who posted the question "Don't they sanitize every flight?"
"The ground crew does all the plane cleaning, they try their best to keep it clean," Cimato typed back. "But this is just in case if it gets missed!"
A report by the United Nations air transportation agency (The International Civil Aviation Organization) showed that the airline industry as a whole lost around $370 billion in 2020 thanks to the pandemic, with passenger numbers plummeting nearly 60% from the year prior.
Cimato did not reveal what airline he works for.
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