In early 2014, Anna Wakelin was flying a Tiger Airways domestic route as part of her certification process to become a captain.
When she smelled something like dirty socks she assumed it was the captain playing a practical joke on her. He wasn’t.
”I started to feel a bit tired … I guess my thinking was a bit foggy,” Wakelin says. “At the end of the day I felt like I was almost drunk.”
Wakelin had experienced a “fume event” in which she was exposed to oil fumes and their additives, most likely through the plane’s ventilation system.
Anna Wakelin is an active pilot affected by fumes that had an impact on her health. Captain Marcus Diamond is the Australian Federation of Air Pilots safety and technical manager. Photograph by Chris Hopkins For Wakelin, the consequences were substantial. Today, she has no doubt she suffered “aerotoxic syndrome”.
But across the industry there is scant comprehensive data about the long-term health effects of these fume events on crew. That has left airlines and workers at a stalemate.
One side argues there isn’t a medical definition for “aerotoxic syndrome”. The other fears that they are at the tip of another endemic workplace illness that takes decades to gain recognition, such as asbestosis or silicosis.
The vast majority of commercial liners today are designed to “bleed” air from the engines, where temperatures hit 2000 degrees C, for use in the interior cabin. When oil gets that hot, it can break down into its constituent chemicals.
And while advanced jet engines are intended to keep cabin air and engine fluids separate, occasionally things go wrong. When that happens, the chemicals can get into the plane’s ventilation systems, resulting in anything from mist or smoke in the cabin to a barely detectable scent. These are classified as “fume events” – a term largely accepted by the industry.
Debilitating fumes That these events can be debilitating is certainly no secret. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau released a report on a June 2023 Sydney-Hobart flight of a Boeing 717 in which flight and cabin crew noticed a “transient chlorine odour”.
The cabin crew initially noticed “dizziness”, with a “feeling of pressure in the head” and a “metallic taste”, the report said.
At one point, “the captain noticed quickly developing adverse effects on vision, mental capacity, and movement, and self-assessed as unable to safely fly the aircraft”.
He handed control to the first officer.
As the plane approached Hobart airport, the first officer, himself feeling “hazy”, noticed his own reactions slowing as the plane lined up with the runway.
After landing, he experienced a dull headache for two days, the ATSB said.
The safety bureau reported “similar occurrences” including ones in Britain, France, and Sweden.