Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 115 posts

Re: Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants

#11

Post by 4d4m »

seizethecheese wrote: post #10
4d4m wrote: post #8

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…

The article specifically says flight attendants are only at increased risk of radiation related cancers, but not others.

Quite interesting. My reaction is that one of these is much more easily controlled and an input for cancer than the other. Radiation shielding is a tougher solve due to weight and other factors, where air quality is an easy, known fix.

Would love both to be solved, which would lead to good outcomes. Any thoughts on why attendants have different outcomes?

Re: Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants

#12

Post by technothrasher »

4d4m wrote: post #8

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…

> 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.

Re: Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants

#13

Post by 4d4m »

technothrasher wrote: post #12
4d4m wrote: post #8

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…

> 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.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/study-shows-toxic-...

If you think of the last 10 flights you were on, how many had the gym sock smell? That's the real occurence rate. I'd say in my experience across all airlines its around 7/10 flights I can detect via smell a fume event.

Re: Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants

#15

Post by raverbashing »

4d4m wrote: post #13
technothrasher wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/study-shows-toxic-... If you think of the last 10 flights you were on, how many had the gym sock smell? That's the real occurence rate. I'd say in my experience across all airlines its around 7/10 flights I can detect via smell a fume event.

Of the last 50 flights I took, none had gym sock smell.

If anything smelled it's usually due to a passenger. But nothing from the aircraft itself

Re: Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants

#17

Post by missedthecue »

Supermancho wrote: post #5
dang wrote: post #65

[stub for offtopicness] (We've since changed the top link.)

paywalled (even with a "free" account")

  Cancer                     Flight attendants   Pilots
  ------------------------------------------------------
  All radiation-related      1.50x               1.36x
  Breast cancer              1.61x               1.57x
  CNS / brain cancer         1.51x               1.28x
  Multiple myeloma           1.34x               1.08x
  Leukemia                   1.12x               1.27x
  Lymphoma                   1.19x               1.04x
  Prostate cancer            1.75x               1.38x
  Melanoma                   1.63x               1.28x
  Nonmelanoma skin cancer    1.50x               1.22x
  Other cancers              1.21x               0.97x
It was a cross-sectional analysis of U.S. death certificates from 2020-2024, covering ~13 million deaths across 503 occupations, including roughly 14,000 pilots and 7,000 flight attendants. The analysis adjusted for age at death, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and marital status.

So in other words, breast cancer was the cause of death at a rate 61% higher for flight attendants than for the comparison population of other occupations.

Re: Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants

#18

Post by bertil »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #9
RajT88 wrote: post #7

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.

[flagged]

Your comments makes problematic suggestions, but I found it funny that the more childish one —farts– is actually very true: with the lower pressure, people do fart more on airplanes.

Re: Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants

#19

Post by wewtyflakes »

technothrasher wrote: post #12
4d4m wrote: post #8

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…

> 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.

That sounds awful; it means 3+ times a day a whole plane of a passengers is getting sprayed with this stuff.
Post reply on HN