AIRLINE food and drink is more often endured than savoured. Airlines know this, and are coming up with new products to make dining and imbibing more palatable for passengers. The latest is from British Airways (BA), which has just unveiled a new tea bag developed specifically for use at 35,000 feet.

The Twinings tea bag is designed for onboard water that is boiled at 89ºC, instead of the 100ºC normally necessary for making black tea. It uses a blend of three teas, two of which are particularly suited to fast extraction at altitude, says Twinings. The perfect cup of tea is promised, with or without milk. BA serves up 35m cuppas a year, so that promise will be put to the test.

If this all sounds suspiciously like a marketing wheeze, there is some scientific basis for creating a tea bag solely for the skies. The way food and drink tastes at altitude is different than it does when you are on the ground. Cabin pressure decreases the volatility of the molecules that you can smell, while the cabin's dry pressurised atmosphere makes the mucous membranes swell up. Your sense of smell (which makes up 90% of your sense of taste) is diminished, and so is the sensitivity of your taste buds.

In 2010 research for Lufthansa by the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics examined how flavours changed during different flight conditions. It concluded that your sense of smell onboard is equivalent to having a cold. Because of this, the foods best suited to high dining are spicy ones such as Thai and Indian because that spiciness doesn't change. Perhaps BA's next venture should be the perfect cup of chai.