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- Hacker News
- Boeing, Bombardier, Learjet, Embraer and Airbus should be forced to clean up aircraft cabin air they poison us with.
For people who don’t know how GROSS this is: on almost every modern passenger jet, the air you breathe is pulled through the engine’s Bleed-Air system before entering the cabin. As oil, hydraulic fluid, or other contaminants leak into that system, those superheated fumes can be pumped directly into the cockpit and cabin. These incidents are literally called "fume events" and are the basis of the "gym sock" smell you can detect when in airports or on a plane, especially during takeoff and landing. This is so pervasive you'll see airline attendants spraying glycol-based air fresheners during these times to COVER UP the smell of this toxic stuff.
[FAA overview](https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/cabin-air-quality-0)
And no, the HEPA filter people like to point to does not make this problem disappear. HEPA filtration primarily cleans recirculated particles. It does not magically remove every gas, vapor, or contaminant entering through the aircraft’s air-supply system.
[FAA research](https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/data_research/resear...)
The absurd part is that we already know how to avoid this architecture. The Boeing 787 is the major commercial exception: its cabin air is supplied by dedicated electric compressors rather than engine bleed air.
So this is not some unsolved engineering problem. The industry made a DESIGN choice to KEEP using a system capable of feeding contaminated engine air into a sealed tube full of passengers, pilots, and flight attendants. Zero regard for their well-being in order to save a few pounds and eck-out more miles per gallon.
Flight crews spend thousands of hours breathing this air over their careers. Passengers have no meaningful ability to know when contamination occurs or opt out. Manufacturers and airlines alike are afraid to put contamination sensors on their planes because it exposes them to liability - it shows the true extent of the problem.
That is not an acceptable health standard in 2026, and it wasn't when these decisions were made. Fix the source, stop pretending filtration alone solves it, and make bleed-air-free cabin ventilation the standard for new aircraft. Demand this from your regulator or determine who is responsible for your health effects.
by 4d4m - > oil, hydraulic fluid, or other contaminants
Will safe aerospace batteries spare us from this?
Recently designed a sustainable thermofluid that it says would work as hydraulic fluid and a de-icing fluid: LBGPC: Lignin, BioPG, Graphene, Phytic acid, Citric acid
by westurner - The 787 in economy (as configured by most airlines) is hell in every other way so boy what a quandaryby gib444
- I believe the pilots air source works differently than the rest of the cabin - at least on the 737. Maybe that explains the difference between the pilots and the flight attendants.by jmpman
- That's interesting to know (thanks for calling it out!), and makes me feel extra glad I've worn a mask during the entire flight on every flight I've been on since 2020 (not that I've been on many)... turns out I was avoiding a lot more than just COVID etc. heh >_<by amatecha
- The Boeing 787 has a bleedless system. It uses dedicated electric compressors for the cabin air.by mmustapic
- The article specifically says flight attendants are only at increased risk of radiation related cancers, but not others.
- > These incidents are literally called "fume events"
Your first FAA link says that these 'fume events' are rare: "The report found that the rate of cabin air quality events is less than 33 events per million aircraft departures." This is about one event every 30,000 flights.
- > This is so pervasive you'll see airline attendants spraying glycol-based air fresheners during these times to COVER UP the smell of this toxic stuff
I've never once seen a flight attendant do that. Flown hundreds and hundreds of times. You'd think something that's "so pervasive" would have been common enough that I'd have seen it dozens of times?
by strictnein - I've wondered if billionaires get their jets lined with lead.
Lead is notoriously heavy, but if you buy a 737 and it only ever has to fly you and a couple other people, it might be feasible.
Or I guess they could just line one section where they spend the majority of the time.
by elromulous - hmmm...
looks like there's something called ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene.
"UHMWPE/hydrogen-rich benzoxazine composite (UHC) exhibits excellent cosmic radiation shielding."
maybe that should be a thing.
by m463 - Lead is bad because the high energy particles hitting lead can multiply particle count. You’d need a significant amount, like 25cm thickness. Too much for weight limits of any airplane.by tomasphan
- Not an auth wall.
Not a pay wall.
Not even a cookie wall (Block Element! bullet ricochet noise)
But a Terms of Use wall?
For an article?
I just wanna read it.
by toomanywalls - Don't forget your lead body armor when going on long flight trips (which they can't charge you extra for).by amelius
- A water bladder above the cockpit might help? I'm not a nuclear physicist, but I stayed at a HolInn Express last night...by jschveibinz
- This doesn't really say what it looks like it says.
They don't have an above average risk of dying of cancer. Rather, if they die they are more likely than average to have died of cancer.
Which is not exactly surprising given that the medical screenings remove many of those who would die of heart issues. What would be strange is if there wasn't a higher percentage of cancer deaths.
by LorenPechtel - … IF they die?by kaikai
- According to Gemini, radiation related cancer rates aren't higher in high elevation cities like Quito or La Paz... Shouldn't they be too? Airliners fly a lot higher but people live in these 24x7.by glimshe
- High altitude Equatorial populations and air crew exposures are different beasts. A 10h flight close to the North Pole is like living in Quito for almost a month. The type of dosage (bursts x contínuous) also matters as the body can probably accommodate more easily, but that's just me saying. Then add natural selection to that mix that should have helped prepare high-altitude populations residents for those living conditions, which will heavily skew the data. Finally, the cosmic shower has lost a lot of energy from 12,000m to say 2,500m, so the "hit" is not the same. It all may end up having an exponential effect reducing cancer rates...
So a flight attendant that clocks ~700h a year, that's roughly 5 years of living in Quito in a year of flying in Sieves. Now, given that the air crew studies are not all that conclusive yet, take high-altitude populations at 5x less exposure and all these other factors I've mentioned, and they will end up having an even lower chance of showing up in any cancer studies.
So... not remotely comparable.
by ojosilva - Attendants have higher risk than pilots. This kind of makes sense, as my understanding is they don't have pilots fly too often. Meanwhile, attendants are flying all the time.by RajT88
- > as my understanding is they don't have pilots fly too often
From a quick search, I can’t find evidence of this. If anything, pilots are in the air more of their week/lives vs. flight attendants.
by jader201 - Cancers rates among Orthopedic surgeons are also much higher than those faced by non surgeon doctors.
This is due to exposure to the radiation from intra operative x rays.
by ViktorRay - Our company shared a wall with an xray lab next door. My coworkers and I were always curious what impacts it would have to our health.by 1-6
- Replacing X-Ray and CT with new imaging would reduce exposure.
HIFU ultrasound arrays are already approved.
Recent research here indicates that longitudinally-polarized Proca waves are usable for Angstrom-scale medical imaging and treatments including tumor lysis and DNA repair.
There are apparently ways to target cancerous cells by their bio signatures in order to only target non-benign tissues.
I'm happy that I kept on with this line of research long enough to realize the medical capabilities (and fire suppression) it enables;
Public link: "I/Q Sampling for Signal Phase" https://share.gemini.google/rDVcVwDnWPTc
It's a Twistor-Grassmanian mapping?
by westurner - I read once that a CT scan is roughly equivalent to 1000 hours of flight WRT radiation exposure. I've had about 6 or 8 of those over the years.by seethishat
- When are you getting your captain stripes then?by sph
- This chart has the flight & CT scan scenarios (among many other): https://xkcd.com/radiation/by magnetic
- Cosmic radiation is mainly protons and heavier nuclei. It's called radiation for legacy reasons, but it's a different beast from Earth's medical CT scans and X-rays which are manly photons.
Cosmic radiation hitting planes is also not the original cosmic protons and He nucleus etc, but secondary N and O nucleus hit by Cosmic particles creating a shower of neutrons, secondary and gamma protons, muons, pions, nuclear fragments... There's also a high dose of photons from these collisions, but proportionally it can be 500x less photons than a CT scan for a 10h USA-Europe flight.
What's biologically significant for air crew are these secondary protons and neutrons, which punch above their weight in damage interactions, they are not comparable to X-rays in Sieve alone.
by ojosilva - Depends on the actual scan. A head CT can be as little as one sievert while a full blown angiogramm can be more than ten sievert. A pilot can accrue 40k flight hours over his career. If 90% of that is at cruising altitude (meaning 3-6 microsievert/hour), that would be 100-200 mSv in total. That would be equivalent to more than a hundred head CTs or a dozen angios. If you need that many CTs, your lifetime cancer risk is probably your smallest concern. But you still wouldn't expose any normal human to that level of radiation.by sigmoid10