Judith T. L. Murawski’s scientific contributions

Pyrolysed engine oil sometimes contaminates the ventilation supply air on commercial aircraft, exposing crew members and passengers to oil fumes. Aircraft occupants have documented both acute and chronic symptoms, largely neurological and respiratory, during and after such exposures. However, aviation regulators do not require airlines to either clean or monitor the ventilation supply air for oil-based contaminants and there is no central reporting system for either crew members or passengers. This paper presents the debate over whether existing evidence of ill health and compromised flight safety warrants engineering and administrative controls to protect crew members in particular. It also describes the regulatory frameworks for aviation workplace safety/health and air supply system design/maintenance in the US. The authors recommend a combination of engineering and administrative controls to prevent exposure to oil fumes on aircraft.

Industry, government, and labor representatives have all acknowledged that air supply sys-tems on commercial aircraft sometimes get contaminated with pyrolyzed engine oil or hydraulic fluid, but efforts to define "sometimes" have been lacking. Despite the lack of attention it has received, the answer to this "how often" question is important because it will influence the willingness of industry, as well as regulators and legislators, to develop and implement control measures to prevent such air supply contami-nation. To address this data gap, an industrial hygienist collected reports of air supply contamination over an 18-month period January 2006 through June 2007 from the following sources, all per defined inclusion criteria: 1 Service Difficulty Reports SDR and Accident and Incident Data System AIDS reports that airlines submitted to the Federal Aviation Administration FAA; 2 incidents that flight attendants docu-mented with one of 20 airlines and copied to one crewmember labor union; and 3 newspaper clips identified in online searches. A qualified airline mechanic reviewed each SDR and AIDS report with an oil or hydraulic fluid-related mechanical defect that did not explicitly mention oil or hydraulic fluid in combination with a specific word that indicated air supply contamination i.smoke" to determine its eligibility. The resulting dataset of 470 air supply contamination events reported in the U.S. commercial fleet over an 18-month period translates into an average of 0.86 events per day and includes 350 incidents reported by airlines to the FAA, 115 reported flight attendants to their airline, and 37 incidents reported by at least one newspaper. There was limited overlap between sources. The data are discussed in detail along with commentary on whether and how the data are representative, the health and operational costs associated with air supply contamination, and some preventive measures.

This paper describes a research project that responds to the United States legislative requirements to establish health surveillance in relation to bleed-air events ("incident reporting") and to analyse filter samples obtained during air quality incidents ("incident monitoring"). The incident reporting component will develop health surveillance systems to collect data on potential health effects. The incident monitoring component completes the development, testing and deployment of a portable air-sampling device to be used by crew members to collect air contaminant data in aircraft. The incident reporting and monitoring systems will be tested in a feasibility study and will provide feedback from crew on the developed instruments, train crew to collect air samples and use the health surveillance system, and deploy samplers to crew. The final product will be a design for a full-scale study, which would produce the scientific rigour necessary to sort out possible relationships between exposures and subsequent symptom reports and confounding circumstances.