Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [52]
QANTAS FLIGHT QF26 left Los Angeles airport under maximum thrust on Saturday 28 July 2007 bound for Auckland, New Zealand. As the plane climbed through 8,000 feet on its way to its cruising altitude, the cockpit filled with a pungent odour similar to blue cheese or vomit. All the air vents in the cockpit on the Boeing 747-338 series jet were directed onto the flight engineer sitting behind the two pilots. He began to struggle. His eyes were watering, his chest tightened and he fought for breath. As he ran through the emergency checklist with blurring vision, he became confused as to whether he had checked an item or not. The flight engineer, captain and first officer put on their oxygen masks in order to continue flying the plane safely. Two non-operating Qantas crew members – relief crew travelling in the cockpit – headed back into the main passenger cabin to try to identify the source of the smell. They came back to say it had also spread through the jumbo’s upper deck and part of the lower passenger area. The crew traced the source of the smell to the air conditioning unit.
After eight minutes the smell had cleared and the operating crew were able to take off the oxygen masks. But the flight engineer was so badly overcome, his heart beating erratically and eyes watering, that he had to go back to the passenger cabin for 15 minutes until his head cleared. The plane carried on to Auckland, where it landed and the flight engineer visited a doctor. None of the passengers who breathed in the same fumes on the flight was told anything was wrong. One of the off-duty Qantas staff who had gone into the passenger cabin had not used an oxygen mask at any time and was exposed to the fumes on the upper deck, flight deck and passenger cabin. When he got to Auckland he felt ill and had to be flown home to Sydney. Once home he spent three days violently vomiting, giving himself a double hernia, and had to seek workers compensation before finally being able to return to work several weeks later.
The toxic fumes event suffered by the flight engineer was not uncommon. It is part of an international aviation scandal that is equivalent in scale to the discovery that smoking or asbestos is bad for you. The truth is only just emerging and no one in the aviation industry wants you to read it. When confronted with these details, Qantas stated that it operated all cabin-air systems within the manufacturer’s guidelines and complied with CASA directives. It pointed out that toxic air instances are very rare – that if there were 13 in a 12-month period, this would equate to one event around every 24,000 flights. But what if you were on one of those flights?
All over the globe, flight crew, pilots and flight attendants have been mounting legal campaigns because their lives have been ruined by inhaling toxic fumes. These are professionals who can no longer work, in some cases can barely function, because of their exposure to these fumes. Others are dying. The flight crews can mount a case and point to individual incidents, but what about the passengers? Many of them have been unknowingly exposed to toxic fumes on aircraft and as a result are struggling with health and mental problems that go undiagnosed for years.
The problem is a cost-cutting design flaw present in almost all modern passenger jet aircraft. It is not possible to pump air for people to breathe straight from the outside of a jet into the pressurised cabin. At the altitude modern jets fly the air is too cold. Originally, on the early Boeing 707 aircraft, the air was pumped through