CAPTAIN TIM BAMBER, MR SIMON EVANS AND MR PETER JACKSON

10 JULY 2007

  Q180  Earl of Selborne: On this monitoring that Captain Bamber is referring to, you raised this five years ago at the previous report. Are you satisfied that in the last five years enough effort has been put in by all parties, including the AHWG, which of course did not exist then, in order to set these trials up which you explained so clearly are what is required?

  Captain Bamber: I cannot answer that fully because I was not on the Aviation Health Working Group five years ago. However, since I joined the Aviation Health Working Group, it has moved at speed that is really ahead of the information that is coming forward. The Aviation Health Working Group has anticipated what COT would recommend, has gone out and tried to locate the sensors, locate things so that when the COT committee recommends, it is in a position to implement the recommendations. The committee could not have done more, faster; I speak over the last two years though, I do not speak about the previous time when I gather there were log jams. I am proud to be a member of what has been a committee that has actually done a lot of good for aviation and has brought together a coalition of oil companies, engine manufacturers, airframe manufacturers, the regulatory authorities, both the Civil Aviation Authority and the medical department of the DfT and trade unions all working together. It is very delicate. We have two airlines participating. One airline is non-BALPA but is participating with the inquiry; the other airline is a foreign airline. We have these things, but it is a very delicate situation. We can be proud of it and it is a forum which ought to move ahead and start inquiring into other issues which are pertinent to aviation in the same bipartisan approach as we have done with cabin air quality.

  Q181  Earl of Selborne: In the previous evidence, which you may have heard—I am not sure whether you were present when they were giving evidence—they also suggested that as well as monitoring, further research needed to be done on the composition of engine oil and on the nature and construction of filters. Would you like to comment on that?

  Captain Bamber: First of all we need to know what is being produced and why it is being produced. There is no point whatsoever in having a filter if there is nothing to filter out or if you can cure the cabin air quality events. We need to have the data coming forward which will come forward rapidly. We had a talk in the Aviation Health Working Group from Pall Industries, who are manufacturers of the principal filter. They say they can make a filter to filter out anything, but they need to know what needs to be filtered out because if you filter out everything, you are left with nothing. They have to know what to produce a filter for. The first stage of the inquiry has to be done before you can move on to the next stage. Likewise with the composition of oils. Is it our job to tell an oil company how to make an oil? Is it our job to say that something is being produced in the oil which is harming our pilots and they should go away and fix it? We take the first view, that we find out what is causing harm and if it is an oil related problem, we say to the oil companies that this appears to be giving a problem, please fix it. I am very reluctant to have civil servants and pilots tell an oil company how to make an oil.

  Q182  Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: You suggested that perhaps one of the options to look at carefully was the length of actual cruise at the top of the flight; the climb and then the descent were critical factors in your own thoughts. Does that not suggest that rather than looking at particular types of aircraft, we should be looking at short air flights with a very short cruising period at the top? This could apply to 747s. I can remember taking a 747 Manchester to Schipol before going on to the Far East. Is that an option?

  Captain Bamber: We ought to wait to see what the data produces first of all.

  Q183  Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: On these specific aircraft.

  Captain Bamber: That will give us a handle on it otherwise we are fishing in the dark. That is my theory. I have no evidence for it. I am just saying it is coincidence that the aeroplanes which seem to have the greatest problem are those which are used almost exclusively on short-haul flying because the general theory is it is a leaking seal and these seals heat up and cool down.

  Q184  Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: What I liked about your theory was that immediately there was a testable hypothesis; you could look at other aircraft with short flights.

  Captain Bamber: We intend to eventually. At the moment though we are looking at monitoring something in the region of 40 aeroplanes.

  Q185  Lord Haskel: We have learned about the health concerns of the crew. Have any members of the public reported any new health concerns since our report in 2000?

  Captain Bamber: The public are obviously concerned with things like SARS and also they have become far more aware of what you might term the risks associated with air travel. Part of the risk is going to places like Bombay and your risk is not that you have flown to Bombay; it is that you are in Bombay. There is a greater awareness of health risks associated with air travel, yes.

  Mr Evans: Sometimes we assume that people are taking a closer interest in potential health risks of air travel; than may be the case simply from what we read in the media. I was grateful for being forewarned of this question because I actually looked at our database in the AUC. I can tell you that since 1 January 2001, out of a total of over 32,000 telephone enquiries, we recorded 94 under the heading "medical". They would include people who wanted to know whether they could fly after 32 weeks of pregnancy, for example, people who were worried about peanut allergies and wanted to have peanuts banned from airports and people who just felt unwell after flying or had had a cold. I did not notice anything new there; anything that any your Lordships around the table would consider to be new. Out of a total of 20,000 written complaints we had 58 that we categorised as medical. I feel more comfortable talking about the written complaints because these are complaints where we have actually seen some documentation and something in writing rather than a telephone enquiry. Running through the list of things that came out of those 58: pregnancy was an issue that came up several times; injury, people who had been injured, typically skiing, and were being told they could not fly for a number of reasons; allergies, peanut allergy is a fairly common one; it was too hot or it was too cold on board. Of those 58 in the six years only two were, for example, from people who were concerned about DVT. Inasmuch as I know what the issues are, paging through those 58 or the 94 telephone enquiries I did not spot anything that struck me as new.

  Q186  Lord Haskel: Do we conclude from that that the pre-flight and the in-flight information available to passengers is perfectly satisfactory?

  Mr Evans: I would be reluctant to conclude that. I am a little bit unsure as to what pre-flight information we should be giving people. I suggest that the concern should be that we are looking at whether there is anything specific to air transport as a potential health issue against which perhaps we should be warning people. If we have not identified anything there, it is difficult to understand precisely what information we should be giving them about air travel specifically. I am sure that people who have existing medical conditions are coping with those conditions throughout their daily life, so they probably know about it better than any of us who would purport to give them information on an inexpert website. They will consult their doctors if they think they need to, if they are doing something that they have not done before or which has caused them concern. Beyond that the main issue that we need to warn people about is that they need to make sure that the airline is comfortable with and prepared to accept them for travel with their particular condition. That is very much in the passengers' interest so that in rare circumstances they may be denied carriage but also, if they need specific provision to be made for them by the airline by forewarning the airline, there is a better chance that the airline will be able to give it to them. I suppose in a convoluted way I have answered yes to your question.

  Q187  Lord Haskel: What about during the flight? We have been told that it is a good idea to get up and walk around and everything. Do you feel that adequate information is given to passengers about that and about the possible health hazards during the flight?

  Mr Evans: I am sure previous speakers before this Committee have alluded to potential practical difficulties of people walking around aircraft. Yes, I would say that is one area where, following your report in 2000, airlines have been much more proactive in drawing their passengers' attention to information. In a number of carriers it was already there in their in-flight magazines and certainly when I have flown recently, there has often been a suggestion that passengers do flick to those pages in the in-flight magazine and look at the health advice there. There is a question of judgment to be made as to whether the airline tells you precisely why they are giving you that information. Since DVT had so much airing in the media and became such a high-profile issue, airlines have been less reluctant to use the expression. They do alert people to the possible risk of DVT if they have certain predisposing factors and so on. Generally it seems to be there, the information is there, passengers' attention is drawn to it. The media have done very well in calming down over the last few years and you see a lot more intelligent, well-researched articles in the travel pages across all the media, not just the quality media, with tips that people can take just to make their travelling more comfortable across the board not specific to particular health issues.

  Q188  Baroness Platt of Writtle: Have crew members or pilots reported any new health concerns since 2000?

  Mr Jackson: Yes; fatigue. It is a factor going back to low-cost airlines and low-cost inclusive tour companies. Their nature of operation is that they want to turn the aeroplanes around fairly quickly. Even though the Civil Aviation Authority in CAP371 laid down guidance on how pilots must be rostered and the maximum hours they can operate, the airlines are tending to use CAP371 as the maximum and they ensure they get the maximum out of their pilots. This is obviously due to commercial pressures, but it is having an effect on the pilots. There are two airlines which have tended to address the problem by putting fixed working times in; six days on and three days off in a fixed working pattern. Unfortunately, whilst it seems very good in principle, the pilots tend to find that their last working day prior to their days-off is eroded by arriving back very late at night. On the start of the flying programme their first flight is always very early, so it eats into the preceding day inasmuch as they have to go to bed early to prepare for it. This, linked with landing back when they come back into England into a different airfield, they have to position back by taxi to their home base before they can drive home, cuts into the time they can have for rest. In some cases, they do not even have taxis, they have self-drive cars provided. This adds to the stress and reduces the rest time unfortunately.

  Q189  Baroness Platt of Writtle: What are the implications of ultra-long-haul flights on pilots' and crews' health?

  Mr Jackson: As an association we have no adverse comment from our crews on this and from a personal point of view, having done it myself, long-haul flights are normally far better for the individual.

  Q190  Chairman: Captain Bamber, do you want to comment on that?

  Captain Bamber: I want to make brief comments on what Mr Jackson said and what Mr Evans said. Basically I wholeheartedly agree with both of them. There was one tiny thing that Mr Evans said about sick passengers. I personally—I am now putting forward a personal view because the Association has not really taken it up—feel that you should, as an airline, treat very warily the idea of refusing passengers travel. Basically I think it should be that all can travel unless there is some explicit overriding reason to refuse them travel. The reason I say this is from my days as a dentist and I hope Lord Colwyn will back me up on this. When AIDS first came out lots of dentists refused to take patients who were in an AIDS-risk category for treatment. So an AIDS-risk category patient went to the dentist with toothache, he was refused treatment; he went to another dentist and did not tell him he was in an AIDS-risk category group so received treatment. That meant the dental surgeon was treating him probably without the full range of precautions that he was able to take in other circumstances, if he knew the true history of the patient. This will feed through into flying. If somebody has to fly to get back to England because they are pregnant and want to have their baby in England, they will say they are 28 weeks instead of 36 weeks. So you will end up carrying a high-risk patient but assuming they are not a high risk. I just mention pregnancy, but it could be any one of a number of things. I would rather carry a passenger knowing they had a risk and knowing what the risk was than carry the same passenger not knowing he or she was a risk. I am very loath to go down the route of denying people travel. That is my only slight disagreement with Mr Evans. As far as Mr Jackson was concerned, where he spoke of new things, I fully and wholeheartedly agree with what he said over fatigue. This is a huge issue facing the airlines at the present time. There are several reasons for this. I shall not go over the ones that Mr Jackson mentioned but just add a few. One of them is the car parking. When I was based at Luton, I parked my car and in one minute's time I was in my office. When I was transferred to Gatwick, it was a minimum of half an hour from the car park to the office and at night and early mornings it could be three quarters of an hour or more. That extended my working day by an hour and a half. When CAP371 was drawn up, which, I do not know whether you know, is the legal maximum that pilots are allowed to work, it said in the prelude to it that the document was not meant to be used as a scheduling document, but was the maximum hours that a pilot could be worked in periods of short time and high workloads. Many companies have taken it as being the basis to which to crew to. They were not able to do this until fairly recently, because if you altered one person's line of work, you had to re-alter every other pilot's line of work manually and that was so time consuming that it could not be done. With the modern computer generated programmes that can fit your programme in and programme all your pilots, they can get the last ounce of work out of pilots. Within the same legislation people are having to work harder because of the computer generated programmes and, as Mr Jackson said, things like slot one departures, which are often airborne at half past six in the morning, which realistically means report half past five, at the airfield at five o'clock at the latest to get your transport to it, which means an hour's drive for most people, leave home at four o'clock, up at half past three. It is not much of a day off when you are getting up at half past three. So things are eaten into from either end and the fatigue issue is a real issue. I looked out some of the data on fatigue. There is a chap called Horne at Loughborough University who has done a huge amount of research on fatigue and he reckons that a fatigued driver is as dangerous as a drunk driver and in some of his articles he has actually gone through and found that something like 25% of all accidents are now related to fatigue. It is a danger that we are putting our passengers in. As a pilot we can only fly an aeroplane with one quarter the amount of alcohol that I can drive to the airport with in my blood or drive home from the airport with in my blood, but I have to have one quarter the amount to fly an aeroplane. As far as fatigue is concerned, I can work a 14-hour plus day at the controls of an aeroplane and that is alright. That strikes me as crazy. Fatigue was an issue which I thought would be ideal for the Aviation Health Working Group to look at in its bipartisan way. We are not after screwing the airlines: we are after making sure that the public travel safely and that they all travel safely to the same playing field. Some airlines have scheduling agreements and do not schedule their pilot to CAP371. Other airlines schedule their pilots to CAP371 and, in our view, they are taking a risk with the travelling public.

  Q191  Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: May I just press on that? This is clearly a very important issue in your mind and indeed in ours. In view of what you have just said, would you be as clear as saying you have reason to believe some airlines are putting passengers and/or crew at risk by their practices?

  Captain Bamber: Without hesitation I would say that; yes. I cannot see how we can have a pilot who has been at the controls that long a time not being a risk to himself and to other road users driving home.

  Q192  Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: Is it the CAP causing the problem or is it the add-ons?

  Captain Bamber: It is principally the add-ons. CAP371 was not written in today's environment. The world has changed, the environment has changed and we need to have a re-look at the whole issue. Personally I think the Aviation Health Working Group, because it is a bipartisan body, is the organisation which should look at that.

  Q193  Chairman: Have you put that to the group? Has the group declined?

  Captain Bamber: No.

  Q194  Chairman: Are there data to show how many hours a pilot flies now compared with the year 2000?

  Captain Bamber: Yes.

  Mr Jackson: Yes. It is mandatory to keep all those records and they have to be available.

  Q195  Chairman: So we could obtain those.

  Captain Bamber: Yes.

  Q196  Chairman: Your argument is that a major factor is that scheduling programmes has become more sophisticated and that is one of the main reasons why pilots fly longer.

  Mr Jackson: Yes, they schedule pilots to fly to the maximum permissible time, not to the spirit of the CAP371 which was designed initially to prevent fatigue.

  Q197  Lord Colwyn: Does the pilot's job not become more and more an issue of just sitting there and making sure that the computer is doing it properly?

  Captain Bamber: You are an anaesthetist. When you are an anaesthetist does your job involve sitting there and reading a book or is it 90% boredom followed by 5% blind panic?

  Lord Colwyn: You have me there.

  Q198  Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: I think we are asking you a question.

  Captain Bamber: I chose to answer it in that way. We used to have a saying, a cold sweaty patient, hot sweaty dentist, which Lord Colwyn will know all about, as I do. The problem is that you have to be alert for when the bells and whistles go off. The majority of the time it is sheer boredom but every two or three months you earn every penny of a year's salary.

  Q199  Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: That is not in doubt but I really wanted to press you just a little further on the extent to which the scheduling is the cause. You are making a very serious charge.

  Captain Bamber: It is the scheduling combined with the add-ons, the fact that you have to park your car. All airports are reserving the near space with their expanding terminals and the thing which is being moved away from the airport is the staff car parking arrangements.