I have been on the 146 for 15 years and been following pprune for the last five years but this is the first time I have felt the urge to post a reply.
I remember, about 15 years ago when I started and for the first ten years or so feeling very unwell and it was DEFINITELY caused by the rotten egg odours about which so many people have experienced - mostly from the APU on the ground.
We were being gassed and I guess it's easy to prove a link between gassing people and illness?
I have to say that in the past five years or so the problem does seem to have been sorted out but I am still left feeling exhausted and generally not 100% after a long day on the aeroplane. Wonderful aeroplane in every other respect.
So if things have changed then there MUST have been a problem in the first place, which they have admitted and common sense says that it's still there, but not as much as before?
I just feel sad that in aviation you have to have an actual accident and wipe out a few people before anybody will take any notice. Half doing the job doesn't appear to work. There's too much money at stake and the crews can't possibly take on the manufacturers and airlines until there's irrefutable proof which is rather difficult to gather.
I know my short term meory has been effected; at the end of a long day I can hardly add the times up in the tech log or at least it takes me a few minutes which is a bit scary. It's easy to disguise it though and as somebody else said it doesn't do to go around saying that you can't add up as people will think you're cracking up - which we might well be doing!
It would be interesting to give a crew a real full blown emergency diversion at the end of a long day and monitor the performance, compare it to SOP's and then wonder why there was such a gap in the actual and the expected.
Mind you if the authorities tried this they would be so alarmed by the results they would probably dicontinue the experiment in case it got out to the outside world.
So sorry I haven't come out sooner and said this in public but I guess like everybody else eventually one gets around to it.
I can't imagine anything is going to change without any concrete proof. Perhaps that's why I didn't bother to do anything.
Rant over.