Nausea, headaches, memory loss, neurological illness, paralysis… from flying?

Indeed. When you’re on a plane, you’re likely breathing in toxic fumes from the cabin air.

According to the Daily Mail, half of the air in your plane “comes from the blisteringly hot heart of its engines… [and] once it has been cooled down, that air, together with any toxins it might have picked up along the way, passes straight into the aircraft cabin totally unfiltered.” And this has been happening since 1962, when airlines realized it was cheaper to recycle engine air than to make air from the outside breathable.

And the unsafe air doesn’t just affect passengers. A Telegraph article last week told the story of a Swedish pilot and co-pilot who were made so ill by cabin air, they were nearly paralyzed while flying. Fortunately, they donned their oxygen masks just in time and safely landed the plane. The recycled (but not clean) cabin air “can cause drowsiness, headaches, flu-like symptoms and nausea — the kind of symptoms that Dr Nicola Hembry, a specialist in environmental medicine, says passengers may wrongly assume have been picked up from another passenger.”

The worst part about this? Governments and airlines have known about problems with cabin air quality for a long time and the technology for clean air is available, but it’s expensive. So airlines haven’t done anything about it yet. News outlets have been reporting on the problem for years. In December of 2000, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported on safety issues with cabin air and in June of 2007, the New Scientist wrote about “aerotoxic syndrome” in pilots.

But there’s hope yet - the Business Traveller reported last week that the UK government has plans to take action around cabin air quality and it seems likely that other countries will follow. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like it will happen any time soon.

photo credit: kla4067

My first thought after reading all of this? “So I’m not crazy, after all.”

Picture it: November 2005, Moscow’s Sheremtyevo airport. Elizabeth and I had spent the last 12 hours camped out on the airport floor, drinking vodka with a middle-aged Russian couple while their 7-year-old daughter read a book nearby. The alcohol eased the language barrier and we bonded over our delayed trip to Egypt in a babble-like blend of Russian, English, French, and German.

Our plane had been delayed by technical problems and when we finally boarded via a spiral staircase that took us through the luggage compartment, I could see why. The ancient Aeroflot Soviet passenger plane was humongous and looked like it hadn’t been worked on since the Cold War. “10 foot ceilings in a plane - how elegant,” I joked to Elizabeth.

We sat on the runway for close to an hour and soon after the plane took off, I began to feel sick to my stomach. My first thought was, “I guess this is what happens when you split a bottle of vodka with three other people.” But it didn’t feel like alcohol-induced nausea and quickly got so bad that I had to make my way to the bathroom.

The air in the plane smelled awful and toxic - like the air in a defunct science lab - and each breath brought on another wave of nausea. I fell into an uncomfortable half-sleep, kept awake by the sickness. After the eight hour flight, I was still bitter that we’d missed a day in Egypt and the plane ride was so rough.

I guess I should have been grateful the air wasn’t so toxic that it paralyzed the pilots.