Coroner warns of toxic air in plane cabins
LONDON — Toxic fumes in cabin air pose a health risk to frequent flyers and aircrew, a British coroner has said in a landmark report.
Sheriff Payne, the senior coroner for Dorset, said people regularly exposed to fumes circulating in planes faced “consequential damage to their health.”
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.
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 Sunday Telegraph, is the first official U.K. 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 in which 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 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.”
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 easy Jet. He is also representing two passengers.
Commercial passenger planes have a system which compresses air from the engines and uses it to pressurize 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 flyers, especially aircrew, can be harmful, the coroner said.
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 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 conclusion 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.”
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 Westgate — had suffered the same symptoms, continued to fly and died from a brain tumour aged 44.
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 recognize and take care of their injured aircrew.”