Examination of Witnesses (Quesitons 174-179)
CAPTAIN TIM
BAMBER, MR
SIMON EVANS
AND MR
PETER JACKSON
10 JULY 2007
Q174Chairman: Welcome
Captain Bamber, Mr Evans and Mr Jackson. Thank you very much for
coming to give us evidence. You will have seen how we proceed
as you have been here already. Would you please introduce yourselves
and make an opening statement, if you so wish?
Captain Bamber: I am Tim Bamber. I am a medically
retired captain from My Travel Airways and I share the distinction,
along with Lord Colwyn, of being a retired dentist.
Q175 Chairman: An interesting combination.
Mr Evans: I am Simon Evans, Chief Executive
at the Air Transport Users Council. My organisation has submitted
a small memorandum and I do not have anything else I would like
to say by way of introduction, thank you.
Mr Jackson: Peter Jackson, one of the directors
of the Independent Pilots Association. My special responsibility
is aircraft engineering and aviation security. I have been in
aviation for 48 years as an engineer and flight engineer and the
only statement is that we have lots of members with this problem,
please help us to fix it.
Q176 Chairman: How effective, in your
experience, has the Aviation Health Working Group been in taking
forward the recommendations of our original inquiry?
Mr Jackson: Slow. Bearing in mind your Lordships'
recommendations came out in 2000 and the Aviation Health Working
Group has only been effective for the last two years, a lot of
time has been wasted. May I refer to the notes I made to answer
your questions? As an association we envisage there are still
shortcomings in what the COT are proposing with regard to the
type of tests they are doing. To take air from an aeroplane as
a sample and back to the laboratory for testing to find out the
basic constituents is wrong. You can do it quite easily on a ground
test rig; the equipment is available; you can access a mass spectrometer
and test in real time. Once you have decided what the constituents
are, and we have a good idea from the report into the Scandinavian
aircraft incident, you can then programme specific sensors to
look for what is then known to exist. The other consideration
we are concerned about as an association is that no real consideration
is being given to the effect of the cocktail that is in the air.
From the Scandinavian incident we have identified 54 possible
constituents.
Q177 Chairman: Can you describe that
incident to us a bit please?
Mr Jackson: The report is available from COT.
Basically, both pilots became severely incapacitated and nearly
crashed the aeroplane. The subsequent report by the Swedish Government
hinted at the possibility of the contaminated air effect being
responsible for the incident. Honeywell subsequently obtained
the affected engine and did tests on it, I believe a full spectroscopic
analysis test on it in a ground test rig, and that is where the
results came from.
Q178 Baroness Platt of Writtle: You were
saying it would be better to put sensors in the aircraft, but
on the other hand you then talked about 54 constituents. That
is going to be rather a difficult job, is it not?
Mr Jackson: It would be a difficult job, hence
the suggestion that the best way forward would be to do the ground
tests first to find out what the constituents are and in what
concentrations. Then the aircraft sensors can be programmed to
look for those specific things. It would make the job a lot easier.
The other fact is, of course, that we do not know what the combined
effects of the 54 constituents are and as far as we have been
able to ascertain nobody has mooted any research to be commissioned.
Q179 Chairman: Mr Evans, Captain Bamber,
would you like to comment on this first question?
Mr Evans: I should like to take a different
view. My organisation has been very comfortable with the way the
Aviation Health Working Group has taken forward the recommendations
from your Lordships' previous report and it has given us great
comfort that there is a forum comprising representation from Government,
from industry and from the Civil Aviation Authority which will
not necessarily take a view on an issue but take a view as to
whether an issue needs further investigation. This has been involved
in discussions on considering whether it should be taken forward,
how it should be taken forward and, in particular, we have taken
great comfort from the setting up of the Aviation Health Unit
within the Civil Aviation Authority, which does provide a repository
for information and for people to know that there is an organisation
taking care of concerns about health in aviation that were not
being taken account of previously.
Captain Bamber: I concur entirely with what
my colleague on my left here, Mr Evans, has said. It might have
been slow off the ground; the Aviation Health Working Group did
not hit the ground running, but in the last couple of years it
has started working extremely well together. It is a forum where
all sectors of the aviation community come together and we are
now working as one to try to investigate problems. As far as the
last House of Lord's inquiry is concerned, we actually brought
up the issue of cabin air quality and said that progress was slow
and it remained slow until recently when COT got going and the
Aviation Health Working Group took a handle on it. We also brought
up air crew health, which I believe Simon Evans has actually now
got a handle on as well. Those are positive results that came
out of the last Lords' inquiry. As far as the COT committee is
concerned, I have given evidence to it, I have attended all the
briefings and hearings and I have read all the reports, most of
which are here, including annex 11 which is the Honeywell data
from the Scandinavian case. If you would like it, I can leave
that with you. Throughout the COT report it does frequently refer
to lack of data, dearth of information: lack of data is paragraphs
32 to 34; paragraph 42 on air exposure monitoring talks about
dearth of information. It is essential in this inquiry that, first
of all, we find out what is being produced. The epidemiologist
and the statistician said that to be sure of monitoring one full-blown
cabin air quality event you have to monitor 3,000 flights, 3,000
sectors, which is a heck of a number of sectors. We have chosen
to monitor the 146 and the 757, because they are the aircraft
in which these events have been most widely reported. The initial
tests of the 146 have gone well. We are having scheduled tests
later on this month in the 757 and we anticipate we start getting
real data back from these tests by the end of September. As my
colleague Mr Jackson from the IPA said, a huge number of volatile
organic compounds occur. Honeywell noted something over 90 and
there were other tests done which again spoke of in the region
of 90 chemicals being produced. It is impossible to monitor each
of these in real time, so we are using two different sensors on
two different types of aircraft that basically will indicate whether
a cabin air event has occurred and what has occurred in it. This
you might term as a screening process, because we want to try
to find out which aeroplanes, out of the 146s and the 757s that
we are monitoring, are prone to these cabin air quality events.
Then we can put the more sophisticated instruments on these aeroplanes
which will monitor in real time but will only monitor a selected
number of semi-volatile organic compounds. We have to get a handle
on what is being produced in these cabin air events, how frequently
they occur, then we can move on to the second stage. As Mr Jackson
so correctly said, it might not be a compound, it may be a couple
of compounds and we are not closing our minds, just saying it
is organophosphates or it is something else. We are saying a large
number of compounds, somewhere in the region of 90, are being
produced, we must find out what they are, we must find out the
quantities of them and then we can target in on it further. It
is like a pyramid: you start with a broad base and work up to
a narrow spectrum. We cannot put the sophisticated sensor on.
The one we have at the moment or possibly the one we will be using
will monitor for six substances. It monitors, which is essential,
on a real-time basis. Of the initial monitors, one of them will
only tell you whether an event has occurred and the other one
gives you a bit more data. It is essential that we have a real
time on this, because it could be that these cabin air events
are being caused by the APU, the auxiliary power unit, that is
the little motor that fires up the electrics and things on the
ground. It could be you are sucking in another airframe's exhaust
fumes when you are taxiing and you could solve it by just moving
further back. It could be—my favourite theory—that
it is when you close the throttles at the top of the descent.
The curious thing is that the aeroplanes that are most susceptible,
the 146 and the 757, are principally being used on short-haul
routes and in short-haul aeroplane flying you climb the aeroplane
to altitude, you close the throttles and you descend again. The
146 does not have a cruise phase or, if it does, it lasts minutes.
We have not had large numbers of these incidents, if any, in things
like the 747 which do long range, where your engines are treated
more fairly. In the 146 and 757 it is a pretty grim life for an
engine: full power; climb power; close throttles; descend.
|
