Poisonous Planes?

Nine’s Sunday is a long way short of the quality public affairs show it once was, but this weekend they have an interesting Cover Story – Poisonous Planes: What The Airlines Aren’t Telling You.

If you’re planning a long haul flight soon, you might want to check out their findings on the chemicals emanating into passenger air systems.

Press Release:

Across the globe, flight crews on different airlines have been conducting a clandestine scientific experiment. They have been secretly swabbing the interiors of modern passenger jet aircraft to test for the presence of a dangerous chemical.

And there’s frightening news for anyone who flies. Almost every time the test results came back positive. Nearly all the planes were contaminated with a known neuro-toxin produced when hot jet oil vaporises into the pressurised air systems used on modern passenger jets.

Seven years ago, SUNDAY uncovered the dangers of long haul flights and deep vein thrombosis – a condition the airlines then played down. This week, SUNDAY asks why passengers are often not told when they are exposed to toxic fumes on flights?

Reporter Ross Coulthart investigates the growing scientific evidence that flight crew and passengers are getting health problems such as chronic fatigue, prolonged nausea, aches and pains from fumes on planes. Some have even been stricken with temporary paralysis and permanent brain damage from a chemical cocktail which contaminates aircraft bleed air systems when engine seals fail.

For over half a century the air we breathe on passenger aircraft has been drawn from the jet engines, cooled and then piped into the aircraft. A cost decision was made at the beginning of the modern passenger jet aircraft era to bleed the air off the jet engines. But there is mounting evidence that when this system fails passengers and flight crew can get chronically ill.

Here in Australia, a Parliamentary inquiry was told eight years ago by the industry and by our air safety watchdog that the chemical that is the chief suspect for this so-called ‘aero-toxic’ syndrome had never been found in an aircraft.

This week, SUNDAY reveals the new evidence which shows how tests done all over the world by concerned flight crew are now showing most passenger planes are contaminated with a known neurotoxin called tri-cresyl phosphate or TCP.

Sunday airs 9am Sunday morning on Nine.