"While some customers and employees will welcome this news, it doesn't mean masks are disappearing forever," said the airline's chief of customer, Leanne Geraghty.
"We really encourage customers to continue to do what makes them comfortable, which is the same message we're sharing with our employees."
Some passengers may not feel comfortable around other passengers not wearing them. Air New Zealand says they will allow passengers to cancel flights for credit, but only until the end of the month.
The move to unmasking, they seem to say, is inevitable.
Why the change now? Having spent the past two years being told that face coverings are a vital bit of air safety and hygiene?
How clean is your cabin?
With the removal of masks we appear to be back to square one on the matter of transmission on planes. Although we are three years, several variants and a vaccine programme wiser, the probability of catching Covid on a plane is not a solid science and fluctuates wildly.
According to a two-year study by MIT the risk of getting infected on a US plane in 2020, at the outbreak of the pandemic, was 1 in 1000 for a two-hour flight.
This dropped to as low as 1 in 2000 in February 2021, because of greater public awareness and masking mandates.
While helpful as a barometer for the risk, ultimately there are so many variables it seems to be a fool's errand to try to calculate personal probability of catching the disease. With everything from flight route, aircraft type to the variants present and attitudes of passengers changing the calculation, it's a broad brush approach.
Auckland University researcher and atmospheric chemist Dr Joel Rindelaub says you can't assume the risk of catching Covid on a plane has reverted to 2020 levels. The study cited by many airlines was concluded in early 2021, "before the highly transmissible Omicron variants were the dominant strains in the population studied."
Report author Arnold Barnett said the risk of infection today "could be considerably higher".
Still the odds are pretty small, on a personal scale, and airlines are keen to tell you of this fact.
In 2020 the International Air Transport Authority (IATA) banded together to defend the safety of air travel. Naturally it wanted to calm the fears of international passengers, telling them the risk of transmission of disease in air cabins was "very low".
Central to this argument was that through the use of Hepa (high-efficiency particulate air) filters, passenger plane cabins offered among the cleanest air of most forms of public transport.
Hospital-grade air filters work to clean the air, recycling the air in the cabin every two minutes.
Germany, which recently overturned mask rules on planes but not other forms of public transport, pointed to the fact most air cabins are filtered.
Health minister Karl Lauterbach cited better air circulation in planes versus trains and taxis, where the government deemed masking "sensible and necessary".
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) deemed air travel to be "low for an individual traveller" but the "risk of being infected on an airplane cannot be excluded".
However, it is only the "cleanest" option relative to other public transport options.
In July, Rindelaub took part in an expose by RNZ taking carbon dioxide detectors aboard buses, trains and taxis to determine the amount of recycled air being breathed in. In some cases the air on public transport was found to be three times above the recommended 800 parts per million.
Rindelaub told the Herald this was less "indicative of Covid risk" in plane cabins, where a high CO2 density might give you a headache but was filtered for "potentially hazardous respiratory particles" like diseases.
While Rindelaub couldn't speak to the motivation behind the decision to drop mask mandates, face coverings are no less effective than they were at the beginning of the week.
"I would still highly recommend using a mask on any form of public transit, aeroplanes included," he said.
If the risk of catching Covid on a plane has not changed or indeed possibly got greater, why has the change happened now?
Are we looking at the wrong risks?
What has changed
"A lot has changed" since the beginning of the pandemic, says statistician Professor Michael Plank.
The modeller from the University of Canterbury has been helping the Government's public health response map the risks of Covid since the start of the pandemic.
"The biggest [changes] being the fact that most people are now vaccinated and the majority of people have probably been previously infected."
The rate of immunity and vaccination against Covid in the population is far higher now than it was when passengers first got on planes in early 2020.
Personal risk of a serious infection is far lower in a highly vaccinated population.
The risk of being hospitalised or developing is 10.5 times lower in vaccinated travellers, according to the medical journal JAMA.
However, Plank suggests that high vaccination and immunity rates could be lowering the risk for all passengers, even those who haven't been vaccinated or caught the virus before. It lowers the chance of encountering an infectious traveller.
"The fact that immunity levels generally are higher now helps to keep cases relatively low at least for now, which reduces risk for everyone."
The biggest change in attitudes to mask wearing and Covid in general has been the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Low cases and high immunity mean the chances of contracting the disease and consequences in most people are low.
However, if you want to further lower the risk of catching the disease or giving it to others, there's a ready-made solution, says Plank:
"Wearing a high-quality mask while travelling is a very good way to do that."
