FEBRUARY 21, 2015
Toxic fumes in cabin air pose a health risk to frequent
fliers and aircrew, a coroner has said in a landmark report.
Stanhope Payne, the senior coroner for Dorset, said people
regularly exposed to fumes circulating in planes faced “consequential damage to
their health”.
Mr Payne, who is inquiring into the death of Richard
Westgate, a British Airways pilot, called on BA and the Civil Aviation Authority
(CAA) to take “urgent action to prevent future deaths”. Most airline
passengers, who fly only occasionally, will not be affected by the problem, but
some frequent travellers who are genetically susceptible to the toxins could
fall ill.
Mr Payne’s call for urgent action is likely to be welcomed
by campaigners who have raised similar concerns for a number of years.
His report, obtained by the Telegraph, is the first official
UK recognition of so-called “aerotoxic syndrome”, a phenomenon long denied by airlines
but which is blamed by some for the deaths of at least two pilots and numerous
other incidents where pilots have passed out in flight. Co-pilots can normally
take over, but campaigners claim the syndrome is a suspected cause of some
mid-air disasters.
Frank Cannon, the lawyer for Mr Westgate’s case, said: “This
report is dynamite. It is the first time a British coroner has come to the
conclusion that damage is being done by cabin air, something the industry has
been denying for years.”
Mr Cannon said he was acting for approximately 50 other
aircrew allegedly affected by the syndrome, working for airlines including
Emirates, Cathay Pacific, Etihad, Thomas Cook and easyJet. He is also
representing two passengers.
Commercial passenger planes have a system which compresses
air from the engines and uses it to pressurise the cabin. But it can
malfunction, with excess oil particles entering the air supply.
In a confined space, with the air recirculated, the
cumulative effect on frequent fliers, especially aircrew, can be harmful, the
coroner said.
Mr Westgate, a senior first officer, died in 2012 after
claiming he had been poisoned by toxic cabin fumes.
In his “prevention of future deaths report”, produced last
week, the coroner says that examinations of Mr Westgate’s body “disclosed
symptoms consistent with exposure to organophosphate compounds in aircraft
cabin air”.
In the report, sent to the chief executive of BA and the
chief operating officer of the Civil Aviation Authority, the coroner raises five
“matters of concern”, including that “organophosphate compounds are present in
aircraft cabin air”; that “the occupants of aircraft cabins are exposed to
organophosphate compounds with consequential damage to their health” and that
“impairment to the health of those controlling aircraft may lead to the death
of occupants”. He also says there is no real-time monitoring to detect failures
in cabin air quality and that no account is taken by airlines of “genetic
variation in the human species that would render individuals … intolerant of
the exposure”.
He demands that BA and the CAA respond to the report within
eight weeks, setting out the action they propose to take. The report, made
under regulation 28 of the Coroners’ Investigation Regulations 2013, is not a
full verdict from an inquest, which has yet to be held in this case.
Tristan Loraine, a former BA captain who claims toxic air
poisoning forced him to leave his job, said: “I took ill-health retirement only
a year after completing the Iron Man triathlon. I had about 10 medical experts
give their view to the CAA that I was suffering from ill-health effects of
contaminated air.
“From the minute I got sick until when I left the airline, I
never saw a BA employee.”
Mr Loraine, who is making a documentary about the issue,
said he had been left with numbness in his fingers and feet and that he
sometimes found it difficult to recall information. He said that a friend in BA
— not Mr Westgate — had suffered the same symptoms, continued to fly and died
from a brain tumour aged 44.
Mr Cannon said: “There are major crashes where we suspect
the only plausible explanation is that the crew were suffering from cognitive
dysfunction. More commonly, it causes incredible misery — very fit, intelligent
and motivated people fall over sick. The first thing BA and other airlines have
to do is recognise and take care of their injured aircrew.”
Most passengers who fly only occasionally will not be
affected by the problem, but some frequent travellers who are genetically susceptible
to the toxins could fall ill, with around 10 per cent of the population
affected. Their bodies are unable to detoxify quickly enough and an
accumulation of toxic material over time becomes dangerous. The main
vulnerability is suffered by aircrew, who spend much of their lives on board.
Official records from the Civil Aviation Authority show that
oxygen masks are being used by pilots and crew at the rate of at least five
times a week to combat suspected “fume events”.
The official safety watchdog, the Air Accident Investigation
Branch, has called for aircraft to be fitted with equipment to detect any
contamination of cabin air.
A spokesman for BA said it could not comment on the case,
but would consider the coroner’s report and respond. The airline cites
independent studies commissioned by the Department for Transport, which found
“no evidence that pollutants occur in the cabin air at levels exceeding
available health and safety standards”.
The Government’s position is that “concerns about significant
risk to the health of airline passengers and crew are not substantiated”. A
spokesman for the CAA said it would consider the report in detail but claimed
it was “nothing that passengers or crew should be overly concerned about”.
Mr Cannon said: “I see this as an impending tsunami for the
airline industry — it’s been ignored for so long.”
The disclosure of Mr Payne’s report comes ahead of a meeting
in London this week of a group set up by the International Transport Workers’
Federation to examine the issue of contaminated air on planes. A spokesman for
the ITF said: “There is growing published evidence of the toxicity of these oil
fumes and the increase in reported fume incidents in which flight safety was
compromised because of crew member impairment.”
