Examination of Witnesses (Quesitons 220-224)
CAPTAIN TIM
BAMBER, MR
SIMON EVANS
AND MR
PETER JACKSON
10 JULY 2007
Q220 Lord Colwyn: It cannot be sealed
in any way.
Captain Bamber: No.
Q221 Chairman: You would not be able
to open the door.
Captain Bamber: Yes. There is a flow. The cockpit
air comes in and is used to cool the avionics panel. There is
a stack of avionics in an aeroplane. So there is quite a high
air flow and it tends to flow from the cockpit to the cabin. Smells
and things allegedly do not come from the cabin to the cockpit
as much. There is a flow in that direction but no pressurisation
or anything like that.
Q222 Earl of Selborne: Going on with
the fume events a bit more, we have recognised that there is a
degree of controversy, or certainly lack of agreement at the moment
about cause and effect of fume events, to what extent they are
implicated in long-term health effects or acute health effects.
That is also true of the Gulf War syndrome where the Ministry
of Defence pay soldiers who claim to suffer from symptoms a disability
allowance because it cannot prove that the symptoms are not due
to exposure to certain neurotoxins. Are there any provisions for
cabin crew who retire early for reasons of ill health following
exposure to fume events? If not, do either of your organisations
have any plans to advocate this?
Captain Bamber: My organisation would prefer
to see initially proper care put in for sick pilots and then perhaps
look at representing the cabin staff. I agree with what you said
about the Gulf War; it is a good analogy. The difference with
my position is that I am an agnostic; I want to be convinced.
There are some who are convinced and say the scientific proof
is there. I say let us set up the scientific experiment and prove
whether or not there are cabin fume events, which I am convinced
there are, and whether or not they are leading to ill health.
It is a difficult thing to investigate the ill health of pilots
because there is no easy comparator group with which you can compare
them. We are a selected, healthy bunch of people when we join,
because anybody with serious illnesses or even relatively mild
illnesses does not become a pilot. Then every six months there
is a cull of the unhealthy. By the time you get to 60 as a pilot
you would hope to live a lot longer than most other people because
you are a selected group of healthy people. There is a bit of
controversy, but not as much controversy as people believe. The
difference is that some say yes, pilots are being made ill, let
us see whether this is the cause. Others say pilots are being
made ill, this must be the cause. That is the real difference.
Mr Jackson: To answer your question, the cabin
crew do not receive any payment. There is no facility for that.
Pilots, on the other hand, in the majority of companies in this
country, are provided with loss of licence insurance which can
pay anything from £100,000 as a one-off payment up to £250,000
if they lose their licence. As we are finding out, those who do
lose their licence cannot claim this loss of licence insurance
because they cannot have a diagnosis on their medical condition.
Q223 Earl of Selborne: A last question
on this theme. We talked about monitoring and I do not want to
go back to that; we have covered that very fully. In your opinion,
are there any other practicable preventative measures that could
be put in place to avoid fume events or to mitigate their effects,
if there are any?
Captain Bamber: At the present state of knowledge,
the answer to that in my view is no. I emphasise that it is at
the present state of knowledge and I would hope that within two
or three months the answer to that will be yes. The makers of
filters said that they can make a filter to filter out anything
but they need to know what to filter out. Until what is there
is found they cannot make a filter. Once we know what is causing
the cabin air events, which is what we need the real time monitor
for, it should be a fairly easy process to fix it. The primary
thing must be to see what fume events are occurring and then a
fix going forward. A fix going forward is going to be a relatively
easy thing to do to prevent pilots and crew suffering these events
in the future. Has-beens like me, who have possibly already suffered
as a result, even on my scale, are third in the queue. The primary
aim must be to find out what is happening and cure it going forward.
Then we can look at whether it has caused ill health, what ill
health and what we can do about it. I am afraid that is the third
rung really.
Mr Jackson: Should it be proved to be emanating
from the engines, as commonsense would seem to point us to think,
it would be relatively simple to put filtration in the pipe work
which comes from the engines carrying the air. The only thing
is that it would be very, very costly in the long term because
all the aeroplanes will have to be re-certified to carry it, because
of the effect of putting a filter in the system.
Q224 Chairman: I hate to bring it up
again because we have talked about it a lot, but it does occur
to me that this problem could be exaggerated. If there is a fume
event, do the pilots then have instructions to report that and
then a procedure go into place where the filters are extracted
from that cabin and tested following it? You do not need to carry
monitors all the time. You can have that or have a canister which
the pilot could open which could absorb a lot of the atmosphere
in the cabin and then close it and have it subsequently monitored.
Are there any procedures like that in place?
Captain Bamber: There are several parts to your
question. I am going to tackle them from the bottom up. As far
as opening a canister is concerned, one of our testing devices
which is being used in the current phase of testing is more or
less that; it looks a little bit like a felt tip pen which is
just uncorked at the beginning of a flight and corked at the end
of the flight and it captures any SVOCs that are in there and
that goes off to a gas spectrometer and is analysed. That is a
very straightforward and simple procedure. The problem with any
pilot-activated device or pilot-sensed device is that some people
do not have a sense of smell, so they would not actually detect
anything. One of the early toxicity effects which happened in
some of the diseases which allegedly are caused by cabin air toxicity
is that you lose your sense of smell as the first stage of the
disease, so those who are most susceptible to the effects of cabin
air toxicity will be the least able to record it. The other problem
is a regulatory one that airlines and parts of the Civil Aviation
Authority do not particularly want pilots in the event of fumes
to be opening the end of a canister. Their primary job is to fly
the aeroplane. They do not want something which takes them away
from their primary job. They are very loath to have anything which
is pilot activated. Our view on the Aviation Health Working Group
has always been that we need something which is automatic, that
will monitor the whole time during the flight and eventually move
on to real time data capture.
Chairman: Unless the Committee have any
other questions, we have run quite late so we must bring it to
a conclusion. Thank you very much for your evidence. If anything
occurs to you that you think we should know, please let us know.
Thank you very much.
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