This airline’s decision just raised serious health concerns about plane cabin air
Low-cost British airline EasyJet has made a decision that has raised serious health concerns for passengers, regarding the quality of air in plane cabins during flights.
The carrier has announced that it would be fitting its aircraft with filters that are specially designed to prevent toxic fumes entering passenger cabins and cockpits.
The reason this is so controversial is that this seems to be a measure to prevent aerotoxic syndrome, the existence of which has been long been denied by the airline industry.
The budget-carrier told The Sunday Times “health concerns” had prompted the decision to “develop and design a new cabin air filtration system”. While it didn’t make a specific mention to aerotoxic syndrome, this passive acknowledgement seems to suggest at the very least that the air quality standards in plane cabins can be lifted.
Tristan Loraine a former British Airways captain who claims toxic cabin in the flight has forced him from his job praised the announcement, saying, “This is the first public acknowledgment by an airline of a problem which this industry, including my own airline, has spent decades denying. I congratulate EasyJet for having the vision and courage which no other airline had.”
Aerotoxic syndrome reportedly occurs when cabin air is compromised, causing it to be contaminated with oil fumes from the heated engines and hazardous chemicals. Crew and passengers breathes these fumes or absorb them through skin, with consistent reports of pilots, flight attendants and frequent flyers falling ill.
A report from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau released in 2014 found passengers and crew on Australian aircraft were exposed to toxic fumes on more than 1,000 occurrences in the five years leading up to the report.
But the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) remains unconvinced.
“Despite the large amount of information available to the Panel, there remain many unanswered questions in seeking to understand the potential for exposures to engine oil in aircraft cabins and the acute and chronic effects on a person’s health as the result of such exposures,” it state in a 2009 report titled Contamination of Aircraft Cabin Air by Bleed Air.
“The information available about the association between specific contaminants and symptoms appeared more frequently conjectural rather than definitive.”
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