BA's in-flight safety chief warns about toxic cabin fumes
 

According the The MailOnline:

Toxic cabin fumes can POISON plane passengers and oxygen masks are no protection warns BA's in-flight safety chief | Daily Mail Online

"The head of in-flight safety for British Airways has admitted that passengers can be 'incapacitated' by toxic fumes on planes.

"Mark Mannering-Smith reportedly wrote on an internal online forum that cabin fumes can be toxic and therefore hurt crew and travellers.

"His comments which were posted on the internet have since been deleted, but were saved by BA staff, reports The Sun on Sunday."

A truly amazing revelation:rolleyes:

Thanks Mark for the highly paid insight:hmm:

What TangoAlphad said.

All MMS was doing was making some quite sensible points and issuing a few reminders to employees on an in house BA forum about some aspects of smoke/fumes incidents. He didn't claim to be revealing anything new.

Why someone thought his comments were worth leaking and why the Mail has chosen to use paraphrase his report and use "poison" in bold in it's headline I can't begin to imagine.........

Well newspapers paraphrase things all the time, though there's possibly more need to do that for DM readers.

Having said that, if something is toxic then, by definition, it's poisonous.

You're not wrong DR, though this is one of those rare occasions when for once I actually have some limited sympathy for those in management trying to do an honest job and keep "the troops" informed.

As I read it ( and I do mean "it") the manager involved was trying to write a piece to address some concerns and one or two half baked theories/medical opinions that were being passed around by word of mouth or by intranet/internet by certain people....some of it similar to some of guff posted in other threads in this place...

The manager promptly finds himself being quoted/paraphrased in a national newpaper which has managed to construct a headline that contains " POISONED" and "BA safety chief"....

Why don't we install sensors in every a/c cabin and monitor cabin air at any time? Because we would find something?

One specific problem might be overfilled engine oil reservoirs. Just more awareness could help big time.

Yes we can. Check engines and what is monitored and datalinked.

Slight thread creep; but in 90's I read a report commissioned by the LH & Alitalia pilot's union into cosmic radiation at >FL300. Evidently a German whose job was the monitoring of radiation in ground plants had travelled in a flight deck with a geiger meter and it went epileptic. The report was every extensive and quite scary. Perhaps it was meant to be. There are now developed 'exposure' models linked to rosters and the amount of time spent >FL300, so everything is OK. (a bit like the fatigue model linked to rosters). I wonder just how much actual data high level was accumulated before those models were designed, and how much was extrapolation and laboratory generated data. It disappeared very quickly into a PR black hole and the unions didn't pursue it publicly; and ECA seems to have been very quiet on the issue.
Then the poisoned cabin air saga came to light and it too was poo poo'd as voodoo and pure speculation; until some scientific tests were done. But it too disappeared into a PR black hole and the unions didn't pursue it publicly. Previously DVT went the same route.
All these were 'inconvenient truths'. The cure was far too difficult to implement so we better not acknowledge the problem and it will fall off the radar.
I remember the same thing with the 'lead in fuel' scare mongering; except that was pursued, proven and corrected. I guess that was an easy affordable solution so it was easier to keep the campaign going once the science was proven.

Care to suggest a standard to monitor against?

Would it be set above flatulence levels?

Would it be seat specific or just averaging between floor and ceiling at the center of a cabin?

and finally what action would be required at each level?

all engines off? or

a 2 hour diversion max?

RAT5 I've heard umpteen versions of that story ( usually as told in the UK gent was from Calder Hall or Aldermaston) over the years. Frankly if someone whose job was meant to be radiation montoring doesn't know what levels he or she would expect to see at high alt then they are no expert, the numbers have been known since Auguste Pickard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Piccard

As far as radiation and studies disappearing down a black hole as an inconvenient truth :ok:, there's plenty of data out there on the open medical sites on the internet thingy. There are some interesting studies yet to be resolved/finalised but that whilst radaiation levels at crusing altitude are high vs. ground level I'm afraid that in general the epidemology doesn't support a hidden radiation threat conspiracy.

Now back to fumes...

Back in the early 90's in a sandy place we carried a chemical agent monitor, similar to the type used at airports these days. It sniffed the air and gave warnings when it detected dangerous levels of various "agents".

Being roughy toughy mil types we tested any number of "gasses" and you would be amazed how often we were in mortal danger! Especial after a curry night.

Surprisingly we all lived to tell the tale.

The old COT/BALPA paper on this issue:

https://cot.food.gov.uk/sites/defaul...alpa200706.pdf

It must also have been nonsense. I've travelled quite frequently with a radiation spectrometer (advanced version of a geiger counter) and whilst the radiation is greater than that at ground level it's far, far, far, below the amount deemed to be even slightly hazardous. If you spent every possible second of your life in the air then it might be a problem after a few years, but for crews it's not a problem.

(edit)There's been a few studies that have done exactly that, to my knowledge none of them found anything. Possibly because there's nothing to find or possibly because they didn't encounter a fume event on the flights that were studied.

This is why I suggested to measure in every single cabin.
Even blood tests right after a flight don't seem to guarantee to leave any traces after fume events sometimes.

Here is one from Germany (A319 4U):
http://www.bfu-web.de/EN/Publication...ublicationFile

In the early 80s lufthansas cabin crew union carried out radiation monitoring and when the preliminary measurements were announced management banned further monitoring.
It was fairly open knowledge in Swissair at the time as we had a lot of ex Luftwaffe pilots and one of our German Swiss skippers purchased his own measuring equipment which was one of the reasons that many of us cruised a few thousand feet below optimal FL.
IATA or IFALPA published a paper on it around that time and very quickly every copy was removed from our crew room.

I tend to agree with Less Hair's take on these matters (cabin air toxicity, that is, as opposed to the separate issue of overexposure to cosmic radiation - clearly less hair might be a symptom of the latter!).

And in relation to that last offered example German report, it occurs to me that the known overfilling of the hydraulic system may have been dismissed a little prematurely. Which systems get a particular and fresh working over on approach? Sure, excess deicing fluid often oozes from where it's been hiding on descent and approach too, but lots of hot hydraulic oil out of design limits caused by overfill would be high on my list for investigation.

Some very strange and nasty smells can come from hot hydraulic oil getting out to the wrong places - I first learned that on farm tractors 45 years ago - but you can step out of those till the smell subsides, and simultaneously retain fully brain function to quickly work out what just went wrong!

How hot does your hydraulic oil need to be?

Air crew radiation dose
 

For those who wish to read a good brief on this, an article published in a nuclear technology news magazine I once edited, Nuclear News, provides an excellent overview of the issue of air crew radiation dose:

http://www3.ans.org/pubs/magazines/nn/pdfs/2000-1-3.pdf

Though published in 2000, the article contains a lot of hard data that are still valid.

Incidentally, there is increasing evidence that the current LNT (linear no-threshold--i.e., any dose at any level is bad) theory of dose response and radiation risk to humans vastly overstates radiation risk. It is well known that exposure to low-level dose can actually reduce cancer prevalence below normal rates because it stimulates cell repair mechanisms, a process called "hormesis":

"Hormesis is a biological phenomenon whereby a beneficial effect (improved health, stress tolerance, growth or longevity) results from exposure to low doses of an agent that is otherwise toxic or lethal when given at higher doses."

Sorry for the thread drift, but this subject was brought up. . . .

Forty years flying and not a single fume problem.* Colleagues did when a chemical container on a freighter sprung a leak but hardly aircraft related.
People I know who have died earlier than expected have been heavy smokers BUT, my father was and still made it to 80.

* Had a few close brushes with The Reaper but most due stoopidity.

If there are obvious fumes can we not put pax on oxygen?