Loathe as I am to cast ‘expert’ opinions on deaths in aircraft ~ there’s enough of those already ~ the stats on the rare occasion I’m bothered to follow them suggest that you, dear reader, like me to do so.
And what struck me about the death of the pilots at La Guardia following collision with a fire truck was what went before. For as Poirot might suggest, the crash like the shot itself may merely be a distraction.
Many years ago I was struck by the efforts of one ex-BA pilot to flag an issue that has never really gone away, but like ice from the barrel of a gun is practically impossible to discern in the aftermath. And that is that certain planes, flown often enough, were to have a debilitating effect on an almost statistically insignificant number of pilots in the long term… but countless in the short. Bear in mind in all of this that BA has long been run by shits, as Richard Branson pointed out at length in ‘Dirty Tricks’.
Accordingly I attended a presentation at Cranfield ~ the UK’s centre of aeronautical excellence that was not best pleased to have rented the space ~ by a small cohort who were fascinated by the deleterious side-effects of operating in or near turbine engines. This included a speaker who had collated illnesses on oil rigs, whose air-conditioning and electrical supplies run on static turbine engines.
The point was, as the middle-aged guy shuffling around with a stick in front of me was able to attest, that what happens in the compressor section does not stay there as it might at Vegas, but is ingested into the cabin along with the ‘bleed air’ that provides both heat or cooling besides pressurisation. He himself had been first to operate a 737 whose engines had been chemically flushed following an encounter with the long tail of the Icelandic volcano that shut down Heathrow.
For it seems that ~ and the 757 was notorious here in the UK at least, along with the 146 ~ the oil in which the bearings ran would, under pyrolysis caused by faulty or overheated bearings, vaporise and work its way in breathable form into the cabin. Unfortunately it turns out to that the multifarious additives in modern lubricants contains chemicals that in one case were used in Vietnam as nerve agents to incapacitate the Vietcong.
Bizarrely those investigating instances of such contamination reported the odour produced as being not unlike ‘sweaty socks’, which I found barely credible until taxying out at Manchester one night when confronted by the same smell as the auxiliary power unit ~ a small jet at the rear of the fuselage ~ was shut down. I pursued the flight, not least because that’s barely an excuse to cancel everyone’s holiday and a fairly sure fire method of being let go.
And that was part of the problem, for it was the problem which therefore bore no name. Nonetheless someone close to me who’d experienced something similar during operation of a wide body bound for the same airport was barely able to complete the technical log in the aftermath; whilst another of the same airlines captains was driving a tram in the city after long-term incapacitation.
At the risk of boring you I headed up Airbus training at a facility in Gatwick now owned by CAE, and was practically the only one there not to have been invalided out of flying for one medical reason or another and ~ you guessed it ~ one such due a hard-to-determine condition that meant he could no longer work ~ you guessed it again ~ within BA’s 757 fleet.
All of this was largely dismissed as bollocks by the bulk of pilots, who are spunky fellows, although as with UFOs we had all either seen one, or knew others who had.
Now, beside the fact I live in a farming community where local wisdom has it too many farmers died too young after exposure to various pesticides, or the fact we’ve all seen Erin Brokovich, there have been any number of occasions when aircraft have returned to the gate following the appearance of a mist in the cabin that has left at least some of the passengers requiring at least short-term hospital treatment beside…
… a Canadair regional jet requiring an emergency landing at La Guardia, with cabin crew reporting obnoxious and debilitating fumes at the rear of the cabin (where in fact all three engines are, if you count that APU).
And so could it be that this silent killer ~ investigation into which has long been suppressed by Big Oil and what might be called ‘Big Air’ ~ has finally shown its true colours, albeit with the collateral deaths of two pilots instead of simply the premature?
Don’t however let it ruin your holiday ~ the thinking has always been that as with any ailment, some are more genetically prone to ill-effect than others.
And we are all walking around with a credit-card's worth of plastic in ourselves.
‘That’ll do nicely, Sir’ as my own doctor puts it.
Ed. We apologise (actually we don’t) for the quality of the image, taken from TV while on a sofa.
