Anyone who thinks this is bollox, can come and ride in our 146's
One guy has been to hospital on no less than 7 occassions in the last couple of years!!!
Is he making it up ??? I don't think so.
There is a Captain who was demoted because he was allegedly the only guy who had these problems. Perhaps he was the only one reporting them ???
The "Company" had intially acknowledged there was a problem and has declared that they had "Rectified the problem".
The Op's Director still thinks the problem has been resolved, as he stated at the Air Quality Seminar in London just recently.
He also had the wind completely taken out of his sails when questioned by an AOPIS member why they were getting so many Air Contamination Reports from his Airline.
Perhaps it was the fear of demotion or even being presented with your P45 ????
After the above demotion I put it to all of you that any "Incidents " were quietly covered up or not reported, lest they ended up in the same boat!!
Quote from one of our Training Captains when presented with the problem was:-
"It's a design fault, there's nothing we can do about it"
On the contrary, I'm afraid this is exactly the reason why all the incidents should be reported and at the very least be entered into the aircraft Tech Log for further investigation.
A neat little trick that our company employs at the moment is that they rotate all the aircraft around the bases, so that they are not in any one place for too long for crews to monitor problem aircraft.
There is no reason for this as several years ago we would have the one aircraft or two, as the case or size of the base dictated at the time.
The aircraft would basically stay at your base untill it was due a servicing at the maintainance base; normally about 6 months or so, then then you would normally get that a/c back again, occassionally you would recieve a different one but you would still keep it for the 6 or so months again. If an a/c stays for more than a few days your in luck...or not as the case may be!
You don't want to be flying a comtaminated a/c for 3 or 4 days in a row. The problem here is that it is unlikely that the same crew will operate it for the same duties. Almost certainly you will operate with a different or partly different crew each time. The guys or girls who have to stay on that aircraft for a number of days if not ill already, will be pretty sick by days 2,3,4 or 5.
Slow build up I think is worse because you doubt your self at first( the nature of the beast) Some of the crew may not be effected due to differing metabolisms etc, so as you remain in the same emvironment other fresher crew who are new to the environment may not develope the same symptoms unless there is a servere contamination problem anyway, then you will get effected regardless.
Since the Air Contamination problem has come to the fore, this is no longer the case; a/c do get rotated on a regular basis .
