Cancer-Related Mortality Among US Pilots and Flight Attendants
jamanetwork.comI read once that a CT scan is roughly equivalent to 1000 hours of flight WRT radiation exposure. I've had about 6 or 8 of those over the years.
This chart has the flight & CT scan scenarios (among many other): https://xkcd.com/radiation/
The CNN article has more info on the study, for those without access to download it:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/19/health/flight-attendants-pilo...
Attendants have higher risk than pilots. This kind of makes sense, as my understanding is they don't have pilots fly too often. Meanwhile, attendants are flying all the time.
> as my understanding is they don't have pilots fly too often
From a quick search, I can’t find evidence of this. If anything, pilots are in the air more of their week/lives vs. flight attendants.
In my search, I found that they spend almost an equal number of hours in air like you said - 75-100 hours per month. If that's the case, after adjusting for sex, these numbers holding would throw some uncertainty into the radiation hypothesis.
The fuselage probably has a lot less attention to shielding even if the cockpit seems very exposed.
I guess I am going off when a pilot spoke at my high school for career day. (Decades ago...)
Older flight attendants look really damaged by the job. The combination of irregular sleep, quite likely too much alcohol and sun in layover locations when younger. Plus radiation, and biological hazards like being around sick people and smelling farts all day. Being in an enclosed space is not that great for the lungs either, just being around people wearing perfume, is likely bad for the lungs
Your comments makes problematic suggestions, but I found it funny that the more childish one —farts– is actually very true: with the lower pressure, people do fart more on airplanes.
What problematic suggestions?
Why is this comment downvoted? This is objectively true. HN is a worse orange reddit.
Cancers rates among Orthopedic surgeons are also much higher than those faced by non surgeon doctors.
This is due to exposure to the radiation from intra operative x rays.
Don't forget your lead body armor when going on long flight trips (which they can't charge you extra for).
paywalled (even with a "free" account")
It was a cross-sectional analysis of U.S. death certificates from 2020-2024, covering ~13 million deaths across 503 occupations, including roughly 14,000 pilots and 7,000 flight attendants. The analysis adjusted for age at death, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and marital status.Cancer Flight attendants Pilots ------------------------------------------------------ All radiation-related 1.50x 1.36x Breast cancer 1.61x 1.57x CNS / brain cancer 1.51x 1.28x Multiple myeloma 1.34x 1.08x Leukemia 1.12x 1.27x Lymphoma 1.19x 1.04x Prostate cancer 1.75x 1.38x Melanoma 1.63x 1.28x Nonmelanoma skin cancer 1.50x 1.22x Other cancers 1.21x 0.97xSo in other words, breast cancer was the cause of death at a rate 61% higher for flight attendants than for the comparison population of other occupations.
It’s wild I can’t even read the abstract to understand what they found.
Boeing, Bombardier, Learjet, Embraer and Airbus should be forced to clean up aircraft cabin air they poison us with.
For people who don’t know how GROSS this is: on almost every modern passenger jet, the air you breathe is pulled through the engine’s Bleed-Air system before entering the cabin. As oil, hydraulic fluid, or other contaminants leak into that system, those superheated fumes can be pumped directly into the cockpit and cabin. These incidents are literally called "fume events" and are the basis of the "gym sock" smell you can detect when in airports or on a plane, especially during takeoff and landing. This is so pervasive you'll see airline attendants spraying glycol-based air fresheners during these times to COVER UP the smell of this toxic stuff.
[FAA overview](https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/cabin-air-quality-0)
And no, the HEPA filter people like to point to does not make this problem disappear. HEPA filtration primarily cleans recirculated particles. It does not magically remove every gas, vapor, or contaminant entering through the aircraft’s air-supply system.
[FAA research](https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/data_research/resear...)
The absurd part is that we already know how to avoid this architecture. The Boeing 787 is the major commercial exception: its cabin air is supplied by dedicated electric compressors rather than engine bleed air.
So this is not some unsolved engineering problem. The industry made a DESIGN choice to KEEP using a system capable of feeding contaminated engine air into a sealed tube full of passengers, pilots, and flight attendants. Zero regard for their well-being in order to save a few pounds and eck-out more miles per gallon.
Flight crews spend thousands of hours breathing this air over their careers. Passengers have no meaningful ability to know when contamination occurs or opt out. Manufacturers and airlines alike are afraid to put contamination sensors on their planes because it exposes them to liability - it shows the true extent of the problem.
That is not an acceptable health standard in 2026, and it wasn't when these decisions were made. Fix the source, stop pretending filtration alone solves it, and make bleed-air-free cabin ventilation the standard for new aircraft. Demand this from your regulator or determine who is responsible for your health effects.
> These incidents are literally called "fume events"
Your first FAA link says that these 'fume events' are rare: "The report found that the rate of cabin air quality events is less than 33 events per million aircraft departures." This is about one event every 30,000 flights.
I have a pretty sensitive sense of smell, and I regularly smell oil/smoke/hydrocarbon smell after they're starting the engines. It also sticks on your clothes after the plane ride, and I'm quite sure it's not just stinky seat smell.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/study-shows-toxic-...
If you think of the last 10 flights you were on, how many had the gym sock smell? That's the real occurence rate. I'd say in my experience across all airlines its around 7/10 flights I can detect via smell a fume event.
In my experience, a large fraction of flights have very stinky air during a substantial portion of the time from when the engines start until takeoff. Whether this is “gym sock” or something else has never been entirely clear to me.
I think airplanes reek too, but mostly because the cleaning done on the seats/cabin is pathetic by overworked and underpaid cabin crew, the average American doesn't wash their asshole (no bidet culture in the USA) so they have smeared shit stains on most of their undergarments, standard BO, etc
Coincidentally, when I am flying anywhere in Asia, I get none of this. I'd unironically rather be on an Indian airline for most flights because for all the flack that Indian people get about cleanliness, they're far more likely than the average gringo to have used a bidet at some point in their lives.
I’ve never noticed this in 35 years and I have an unusually sensitive sense of smell.
I don’t think I’ve noticed gym socks smells, but I can certainly smell kerosene basically every time when outdoors at the airport, and often in the plane.
Of the last 50 flights I took, none had gym sock smell.
If anything smelled it's usually due to a passenger. But nothing from the aircraft itself
We're not talking about stinky passengers, those are normal, expected smells :)
Politely, I don't believe you haven't noticed the smell - this statistically is impossible when at an airport with multiple planes. You can smell it daily, at any airport terminal of your choosing, impossible to ignore when closer to the gates. It's a smell powerful enough to not get eaten by the various encapulation, ozone generators, and air fresheners used in public commerical environments like airports. The smell comes through from the planes and gangways into the terminal itself.
Next trip: With a clear nose, smell the air at the airport entrance and then compare this with the smell closer to your gate. The contaminated airs smell it's very similar to a wet locker room or gym bag that was left for days without cleaning. You won't ever miss it again, and your stat will flip to detected in 50 out 50 visits.
That sounds awful; it means 3+ times a day a whole plane of a passengers is getting sprayed with this stuff.
That's interesting to know (thanks for calling it out!), and makes me feel extra glad I've worn a mask during the entire flight on every flight I've been on since 2020 (not that I've been on many)... turns out I was avoiding a lot more than just COVID etc. heh >_<
The article specifically says flight attendants are only at increased risk of radiation related cancers, but not others.
Quite interesting. My reaction is that one of these is much more easily controlled and an input for cancer than the other. Radiation shielding is a tougher solve due to weight and other factors, where air quality is an easy, known fix.
Would love both to be solved, which would lead to good outcomes. Any thoughts on why attendants have different outcomes?
Off topic: when did using solve as a noun take off? There are so many good nouns that work there (challenge, task, etc...) or use the verb form (is tougher to solve).
It’s no different than “a big ask” or a “tough sell”.
In the bay area this trend of nounifying verbs is common amongst VCs and C-level startup execs. I'm not sure if it's arisen due to peacocking or a higher incidence of ESL in those communities.
> This is so pervasive you'll see airline attendants spraying glycol-based air fresheners during these times to COVER UP the smell of this toxic stuff
I've never once seen a flight attendant do that. Flown hundreds and hundreds of times. You'd think something that's "so pervasive" would have been common enough that I'd have seen it dozens of times?
https://farahandfarah.com/blog/toxic-airplane-fumes-workers-...
Feels like youre defensive about this would love to know why. If you havent seen aerosols on a flight youre being disengenous or are not looking up/around. They are used for lavoratories and pest fumiagation during passengered flights regularly - and those are uses we agreed to as a society. Ive seen firsthand them sprayed during takeoff and landing at the time fume events are most noticed by passengers.
Disclaimer: I am an aviation enthusiast and loves planes and their design. I am unaffiliated with any airline or manufacturer. I want everyone to breathe ok.
The Boeing 787 has a bleedless system. It uses dedicated electric compressors for the cabin air.
Like others, I have zero experience with any of the things you are mentioning, but I want flying to be more expensive, more luxurious, and far more comfortable in general for everyone so please keep giving them a hard time about this.
In general, 50% or more of the people flying should not be flying, and going back to the pre-privatization era alongside much stricter regulations on seat sizes would be awesome as it would force actual economics of scale to kick in for the good seats and keep the burger king crown wearing crowd ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onib3bDo6Z0 ) off these airplanes for good.
I believe the pilots air source works differently than the rest of the cabin - at least on the 737. Maybe that explains the difference between the pilots and the flight attendants.