1) How are flights o the polar routes going to cope or deal with this
if the solar discharge takes only about 8 minutes to reach the earth's
atmosphere?
Light takes 8 minutes, travelling at the speed of. Protons, having mass, wander along at a lower speed. The gap between the two gives you your detection to hazard time - which is usually two or more hours.
Solar flare - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The
radiation hazard to polar aviation isn't required to be monitored for crew, but most airlines run regular programs to check for crew radiation. My airline tracks radiation exposure through their rostering system, and the roster each month has a dosage prediction at the bottom (which is always well below limits). Having said that, the prediction runs on average not real time, data.
A study by Mertens of polar flights during a solar storm in 2003 showed that passengers received about 12 percent of the annual radiation limit recommended by the International Committee on Radiological Protection. The exposures were greater than on typical flights at lower latitudes, and confirmed concerns about commercial flights using polar routes.
While the flights studied appear to have not put passengers in danger of exceeding the safe radiation limit on an individual flight, concerns remain, Mertens said. Many workers whose jobs expose them to consistent radiation sources log that exposure to keep a record over one's career. This is not the case for commercial aircrew, which receive the highest radiation levels of any occupationally exposed group.
People who work on commercial airline flights are technically listed as "radiation workers" by the federal government – a classification that includes nuclear plant workers and X-ray technicians. But unlike some others in that category, flight crews do not quantify the radiation they are exposed to.
NASA - Thousand-fold Rise in Polar Flights Hikes Radiation Risk
If you want a bit more information, my previous airline's company doctor produced the following paper on crew radiation exposure (admittedly for Australian conditions), and the limits:
http://www.pprune.org/pub/gen/radiation.htm