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not_a_moth

Makes me think about fume events:

http://avherald.com/h?article=4b6eb830&opt=1024

At a claimed 2,000 events per year, find it a little disturbing that there aren't requirements to monitor air bleed.

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A lot of the fume events are reported by Lufthansa [1].

I strongly suspect that that's not because Lufthansa has more fume events than other airlines, but because they are more scrupulous about reporting them. Thus, 5 events per day might not be implausible. It does seem about time to do something about that.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the 787 Dreamliner, but there might be something to the idea of replacing bleed air by a better alternative.

[1] http://avherald.com/h?search_term=fumes&opt=0&dosearch=1&sea...

EDIT: that ^ search originally only included accidents (missing mere incidents)

I've done work in this area. It's really hard to monitor the bleed air because the required equipment is very expensive and degrades fairly rapidly over time due to contamination from random stuff. For example, when you sit behind another airliner waiting, the engine ingests exhaust and that causes lots of (mostly harmless) stuff to enter the bleed air which you then need to worry about getting in your sensor.

Maybe this is a hint that aircraft that are behind other aircraft should recirculate their cabin air instead of adding outside air until they’re somewhere less stinky.

I'm willing to bet that would be worse. Try to visualize the amount of air volume per passenger on a fully loaded A321. More than a few minutes of that would probably make the cabin unbearably stuffy.

Probably about 5cfm/person + 0.12cfm/sqft based on typical ASHRAE Standard 62.1 numbers.

Although they don't have "Airliner Cabin" as a space type, my guess is based on sedentary 1met people and a rather high VOC load from the amount of luggage and upholstery is in an Airliner Cabin. Might be higher on the cfm/sqft.

I find that page kind of dubious at best, given the substantial number of factual assertions without sources, the conveniently unavailable video, the entirely anonymous letter cited as a source, and the basic fact that even the very existence of "aerotoxic syndrome" has been rejected by inquiries and studies in several countries[1][2].

[1]: http://www.asma.org/asma/media/asma/Travel-Publications/Cabi...

[2]: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199900/ldselect/ldsc...

Edit: The "evidence" on that page is the existence of pilots who died prematurely of heart conditions and suicides, an anonymous letter scanned from a self-published book, a conveniently unavailable video, a bunch of slides without citations, the presumption that a lack of official information about a supposed previous event (which has all the same hallmarks of non-proof) is proof of a nefarious conspiracy, and a death report that mentions acute myocardial infarction and lethal levels of opioids from which we're somehow supposed to conclude that the actual cause of death was an airborne neurotoxin inhaled 50 days before.

Ok but "fume events" are reported all the time; I'm not sure what exactly you're disputing. Maybe it sounds conspiracy-theory like to you, that there is this not often discussed risk in flying due to supplying cabin air from the jet engine directly, but the FAA has recently shown that their corporate relations trump public safety, and there are clearly major financial interests to downplay the risk and keep out of the mainstream. Folks should use their own judgment.

The existence of fume events, and the basic health concerns that come with being exposed to jet fumes or aerated oil, are not a conspiracy theory. The idea that fume events are somehow linked to mass exposure to a neurotoxin that the FAA and every other major government are suppressing information about is a conspiracy theory.

> The idea that fume events are somehow linked to mass exposure to a neurotoxin that the FAA and every other major government are suppressing information about is a conspiracy theory.

Alternatively, there is no conspiracy, and every major government simply ignores dangers of aviation jet fumes. Sort of how everyone was sure, that invisible radiation is near-harmless and that radium dials are safe to use, until suddenly they weren't.

Well yes, but when it's a safety obsessed industry that's conducted studies into neurotoxins and cabin air is the subject of debates by national Parliaments, there's also the possibility that the internet theorist with no medical training might be being ignored because he's wrong. (the Mulder paper is, admittedly, considerably more substantial, although it's also a study of a single deceased individual)

https://www.aviation24.be/airlines/study-reveals-permanent-b...

This is terrifying.

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