Here’s something we don’t often see addressed, even though it seems like it should be of concern…
Continue reading: Korea Adds Law To Limit Airline Crew Radiation Exposure
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
Sorry, you can't bid on that route, you have too many millisieverts. I'm sure that will make the senior attendants very happy.
Interesting change. I wonder how they will measure this, practically speaking.
I am a radiation oncologist (doctor that uses radiation to treat cancer and other diseases).
The limits for my staff (myself included) is 50 mSv per year (lower for those who are pregnant). We all wear radiation dosimeter badges to make sure that this is carefully cataloged. It requires a fair amount of work to keep track of, so I doubt that any airline would go to the trouble of actually documenting to that degree, especially for a dose as low as 6 mSv.
Here is actually a great representation of various comparison doses for radiation: https://xkcd.com/radiation/
Most crew members will probably receive far below 6 mSv per year. For example, based on this analysis of various flight routes, JFK-HKG would yield a max of around 100 microsieverts of radiation per leg. 6 millisieverts = 6000 microsieverts, so that would be 60 JFK-HKG one way's, or about 2.5 round trips per month x 12 months. Definitely possible to bump up against that.
In Germany we have a law to limit airline Crew radiation exposure for many many years.
The max yearly amount of exposure is 20 mSv. Your life long max exposure is 400 mSv.
Crews have to get a special training every year about radiation exposure. All information are being saved for years and you can check your specific exposure for every year.
On a flight from FRA-LAX the exposure is about 65 μSv.
1000 μSv = 1 mSv
FRA-ICN is about 54 μSv so you could do about 55 FRA-ICN turnarounds in 1 year.
I had a friend who was a flight attendant at ElAl, and she mentioned how she couldn't too many flights on the TLV-LAX route since it was restricted due to the amount of radiation exposure (since this flight flies over the north pole).
ALPA couldn’t care less about Korea placing a restriction on their Flight Attendants.
My sister died of skin cancer without ever having spent a day in the sun. She was a senior flight attendant for a European airline who exclusively flew trans polar trips. At the time of her death, the airline had started a (non related) study on the exposure of crew members exposed to excessive radiation. There is no proof, I don't know where that study went...
Lots of typos. Is hiring an editor from Fiverr or Upwork prohibitively expensive?
I'm wondering if the incentive here isn't to "schedule less", rather it would be to increase shielding on the plane to reduce radiation for flights. It would likely add weight, so this needs to be regulatory than random goodwill from KAL.
Passengers do more choosing so it is deemed to be their responsibility.
If employer requires flying, can change job.
More surprising would be if this is really only Flight Attendants rather than all Flight Crew.
Why should pilots be any different (or does the hardware above their heads provide relevant protection?)
What happens when you approach life-time limit?
Does switching to short-haul reduce the rate sufficiently?
Does the airline have to find one a desk-job?
Or does one get made redundant?
Measurement based on pre-calculated dosage per scheduled route.
Yes, diversions happen.
So the amounts may not be accurate enough for detailed scientific research, but perfectly adequate for regulation.
After all, nobody knows whether the appropriate limit should be 6mSv, 5, 7, or the 50 which applies to you - the effect is presumably continuous and the idea is to keep the chance of harm below some small percentage.
P.S. That is a great chart - particularly Day hiking in Colorado = 4x living near coal plant = 12x living near nuclear plant (or eating a banana)
Several of those long-term studies do point out that there is a very likely effect from leisure activities associated with the occupation (crew on those twice-weekly long-haul flights to sunny holiday destinations tend not to sit inside all day) and a quite likely one from the cosmic radiation, but separating out the two is tricky, especially for long-term studies using data from the days when most people were not aware of risk from sun exposure.
The 6 mSv limit in flight is unjustifiably low. Even when being on the safe side, 20 mSv/year is more reasonable. A single chest CT scan is 6 mSv. An astronaut spending 6 months on the ISS receives 70 mSv. Radiation workers are permitted 50 mSv/year.
Cosmic radiation is a non-issue compared to the radiation received from smoking, yet the Korean Aviation Authorities aren’t regulating that.
In short, that new rule doesn’t make sense.
FAR 117 rules, normal scheduling practices and minimal amount of polar routes (which is where most of your radiation dosage applicable to this discussion would occur, you could count them on 1 hand) means 99.9999% of US pilot wouldn’t reach a fraction of this threshold. Again it’s not even on ALPA’s radar and if it was at one point they’d spend 5 minutes discussing, then realize it might effect 0-10 pilots a year and as such isn’t worth a dime in lobbying effort. But please continue to discuss a topic you have no operational nor even theoretical knowledge about.
It’s not “schedule less”, just a limitation on trans polar flights because that’s where you will receive the dosages relevant to this discussion.
Those studies were also WAY before the prevalence of trans polar flights which are the real flights in question here. Normal long haul flying in terms of ionizing radiation are no different than multiple short haul, the issue that leads to however is constant circadian rhythm disruption which also increases illness.
After about dozen or so years of cockpit-seat sun exposure doing fairly regular Florida and Nassau turns from the Northeast, I had a mole on my earlobe change shape and darken. It turned out to be a melanoma, which I luckily had excised before it had a chance to grow and metastasize. The risk is not just academic, but real.
There are many laws pertaining to work related health concerns, usually regulated by OSHA. Personal travel is a personal decision though the risk should be better disseminated. When we did a 13 hour plane trip with a (wife) possible pregnancy I planned to take routes that would not be polar.
The annual limit for radiation workers has actually been lowered to 20 mSv for category A and for category B it is 6 mSv (the reason for the airline to set the limit at 6). An employer also has a legal responsibility to even out the exposure amongst its staff.
Sorry if this is a really silly question but would wearing sunscreen protect you against the radiation? Isn't that what sunscreen is made for or is this radiation different then UV radiation?
We are not talking about UV, however as a pilot I do wear a light sunscreen in the flight deck. Ur getting a really good dose on polar routings even though during the winter you might be in the darkness the entire flight!