WASHINGTON — Air inside some planes can turn toxic and cause serious illness, alleges a lawsuit filed Monday against Boeing — the world’s biggest plane manufacturer.
Four flight attendants are suing the company saying it knew about a defect that allows toxic fumes to leak through the engines and into the cabin, NBC News reports.
The four flight attendants were on board an Alaska Airlines flight in July 2013 that was forced to land when they all became seriously ill. Two of the flight attendants passed out, NBC News reports.
“The next thing I knew was on the galley floor, and the other flight attendant was on the PA system just mumbling incoherently,” one of the flight attendants, Vanessa Woods told NBC News.
The flight attendants were all rushed to the hospital complaining of disorientation and struggling to concentrate. Since the incident, Woods and two other flight attendants tell NBC News they suffer from tremors as well neurological and memory problems, which prevent them from returning to work.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in Illinois’ Cook County Circuit Court, accuses Boeing planes of having defects with their air ventilation systems, which puts flight crews and passengers at risk.
Planes are ventilated by a “bleed-air” system that brings air through the planes’ engines and into the cabin, but if there is an engine defect, burning oil can mix in with the cabin air, NBC News reports.
Rainey Booth, the lawyer for one of the flight attendants, told the Chicago Tribune that Boeing has known about the air ventilation problems for years.
“Our focus is on Boeing not fixing a problem they’ve known about for more than 60 years,” Booth said to Chicago Tribune. “The risk to any individual passenger might be low on a daily basis, but what we know is, every day people in this country are exposed.”
One expert told the Tribune that “fume events” are common and likely happen on at least one U.S. flight per day. However, the lawsuit claims that Boeing “poisoned” the crew and its failure to warn anybody about the dangers of toxic cabin air were fraudulent and negligent.
Boeing declined to comment on this suit to NBC News, but did say “cabin air is safe to breathe. Research has consistently shown that cabin air meets health and safety standards and that contaminant levels are generally low.”
Boeing isn’t the only airplane manufacturer that uses a bleed-air system, but it is the only one named in the lawsuit. Similar complaints have been heard from other airlines and the issue is taking on some urgency after air ventilation problems are being blamed for two United Kingdom pilot deaths, NBC News’ Tom Costello told WTOP Tuesday.
“This has been gaining traction over that last few weeks and months with flight attendants around the world claiming they have been suffering these neurological effects,” Costello says.
He adds that flight crews are seeing the harmful effects of air system defects before passengers because they are up in the plane all day and consistently on the plane longer than passengers.
“They are also working when they are up in the air, they aren’t sitting down, so they are breathing that stuff in even more,” Costello says.
Watch a video about the NBC News report:
