LUFTHANSA WAKES UP TO THE DANGER OF INTOXICATING FUMES IN THE COCKPIT.
The German press has lately been excitedly reporting on an admission by Lufthansa that, in 2010, an Airbus flight landing at Cologne only narrowly avoided a major disaster when its two pilots were severely incapacitated by toxic fumes from air recirculated into the airliner from its engines.
Back in June 2007, I was reporting
here how dozens of similar incidents affecting aircrew had been covered up because many airliners draw cabin air from their engines, contaminated by organophosphate (OP) chemicals used to reduce wear.
Several senior pilots who were forced to retire early are suffering in this way had teamed up with expert scientists and doctors to expose this system's potentially disastrous effects. But they met with a blanket denials from the officialdom and aviation industries of Britain, the US and Australia, because these tricresyl phosphates had been officially approved as safe. Any admission of the problem could have set off an avalanche of compensation claims.
In the 1990's, I ran a long campaign here to expose a similar cover-up of the tragedy befalling thousands of sheep farmers whose health and lives were destroyed after they were forced to dip their animals in OP compounds similarly licensed as safe to use.
I was eventually able to reveal a secret report confirming this by the Health and Safety Executive, but suppressed for the same reason when John Gummer was agriculture minister.
Lufthansa may now have caused a stir in Germany by announcing that its A 380 airliner fleet is to be "upgraded" to end the risk from these "oil fumes". But it has not yet come clean about the mass of scientific evidence (reported in my book
Scared to Death) which links the problem directly to the tricresyl phosphates still being pumped into airliners carrying millions of passengers a year.