withey bleed air products liability actions filed against boeing and airbus plaintiff magazine

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JANUARY 2010

“Bleed air” productsliability actions filedagainst Boeing and Airbus

Public Justice alleges that manufacturing defects havecaused engine fumes to enter cabins, with debilitating

health effects on flight attendants and countless others.B Y M IKE W ITHEY

Terry Williams was a flight attendantfor American Airlines for over 17 years.On April 11, 2007, she worked a routineflight from Memphis to Dallas. She neverimagined that this ordinary flight wouldbe the last she ever worked – and the lasttime she would be even remotely healthy.

Immediately upon landing in Dallas,Ms. Williams observed a smoky haze inthe first-class section that made hercough, irritated her throat and gave herheadaches. Over the next several days,her symptoms worsened and she wasforced to stay home from work. When shereported to work eight days after the inci-dent, she was unable to stop coughingand was finally rushed to the hospital. Atthe time, Ms. Williams’ doctors were mys-tified as to the cause of her illness. Butthe cause has since been identified: Ms.

Williams, like many others, had unwit-tingly been poisoned by toxic “bleed air”fumes emitted from the jet engines.

Those fumes have taken a terribletoll on Ms. Williams and countless others.Since her exposure that fateful day, Ms.

Williams has suffered from crippling mi-graine headaches, uncontrollabletremors, coughing and bronchial spasms,difficulty breathing, gastrointestinal dis-tress, insomnia, memory loss, weakness,disorientation, dizziness, numbness and

tingling in her extremi-ties, and a respiratorycondition. She can nolonger work, and shehas been told by herdoctors that she is per-manently disabled.

A first step to-

wards justiceIn April 2009,

Terry Williams filed agroundbreaking prod-uct liability lawsuitagainst McDonnellDouglas Corporationand The Boeing Com-pany in Washingtonstate court. (McDonnellDouglas designed andmanufactured the air-craft involved in thiscase and is a whollyowned subsidiary of Boeing.) The lawsuitcharges that Boeing has known for morethan 50 years about the potentially ad-

verse health effects that can result fromtoxic engine oil fumes that its planes’

ventilation systems, known as “bleed air”systems, allow to enter the cabin’s air sup-ply. Her suit alleges that such “bleed airfume events” pose risks far beyond that

which the normal flight attendant or pas-senger would ever contemplate.

Figure 1

Even though the aircraft industry hasknown for decades that bleed-air ventila-tion systems can introduce toxic chemi-cals into airplanes’ air supply, only veryrecently have passengers and flight crewmembers begun to take the industry tocourt to hold it accountable for thechronic and permanently disabling healthproblems that its ventilation systems caninflict on passengers and crew members.In particular, the last three months have

Copyright © 2010 by the author.

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JANUARY 2010

seen a spate of lawsuits aimed at forcingthe industry to address the harms thatcan result from bleed air fume events.

Public Justice, a public interest lawfirm headquartered in Washington, DC,has joined Terry Williams’ lawsuit againstBoeing, which is the first lawsuit directedat spurring aircraft manufacturers to ad-dress this serious health risk. The lawsuit,filed in Washington state court, alleges adesign defect: that Boeing’s system of airdelivery is defective because the healthrisks to crew and passengers far exceedconsumer expectations. The suit also al-leges that there are alternative safe de-signs, including the use of filters andsensors, that are both feasible and also

would have reduced or eliminated the se-rious health risks of bleed air.

Public Justice’s team of cooperatingcounsel, Alisa Brodkowitz, Mike Witheyand Ted Leopold, has also initiated litiga-tion against Airbus and Southwest Air-lines for similar fume events that led todebilitating long-term injuries to Valerie

Vaughn and Victoria Vaughn Holsted –twin sisters who were passengers on aSouthwest flight that made an emergencylanding after a fume event – and LucyMayorga and Adriana Moravcik, flight at-tendants for US Airlines, who experi-enced a fume event while on board an

Airbus A319-312. Ms. Mayorga and Ms.Moravcik’s suit, filed in Florida federalcourt, alleges similar design defect andfailure to warn theories against Airbusthat Ms. Williams alleged against Boeing.The Vaughn-Holsted suit, filed in federalcourt in Alabama, alleges that Southwest,as a common carrier, owed passengers ahigher duty of care but failed in that dutyby improperly operating and maintainingits air delivery system, resulting in perma-nent and disabling injuries to the twoplaintiffs.

What exactly is “bleed air”?

Bleed air fume events occur whenthe operation and design of bleed air

ventilation systems – the ventilation sys-tems used in nearly all commercial pas-senger aircraft – permit heated engine oil

and hydraulic fluid to contaminate air-craft air supply. Such events have beendocumented in the aviation industrysince the introduction of bleed air venti-lation systems in the 1950s. As early as1953, the Committee on Aviation Toxi-cology of the Aero Medical Associationacknowledged the potential for “toxicsubstances [to] arise in personnel com-partments of an airplane [supplied withbleed air] from such sources as oil . . .and hydraulic fluids.”

In a bleed-air ventilation system, out-side air is drawn in, compressed in theaircraft engines or auxiliary power unit(APU), and then cooled and routed to thecabin and flight deck through ventilationducting. The APU supplies bleed air

when the main engines are not operating– i.e., when the aircraft is on the ground –and the engines supply bleed air in flight.The engines’ air compressors and the

APU have a “wet side” that comes intocontact with engine oils and a “dry side”that comes into contact with supply air;the wet and dry sides are supposed to bekept separate with tight-fitting seals.

But as a result of leaky seals, defi-cient maintenance, excess oil, or evenroutine operation, engine oil and hy-draulic fluids can become “pyrolized,” orsuperheated, and contaminate the plane’sair supply. Such contamination generallyoccurs during takeoff or landing, whenthere is increased engine thrust and, as aresult, load on the seals. In Terry

Williams’ case, for instance, the mainte-nance logs document that there was an oilleak in the plane’s APU and it was takenout of service. The presence of pyrolizedengine oil and hydraulic fluids in the airsupply is deeply problematic because al-most all engine oils and hydraulic lubri-cation products contain a toxicorganophosphate known as tricresylphos-phate (TCP), along with other volatile or-ganic compounds. These compounds

were once commonly used in pesticidesand insecticides but have now beenbanned in most states. The only filtersused in conjunction with the air deliverysystem are HEPA filters that are unable to

detect or filter out these harmful volatileorganic compounds.

Recently, a groundbreaking study by Judith Murawski, an industrial hygienist,and David S. Supplee, the Director of Flight Safety for the Association of Flight

Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA), examinedthe frequency and causes of bleed-airfume events in commercial aircraft in theUnited States. The May 2008 article, An

Attempt to Characterize the Frequency, Healt Impact, and Operational Costs of Oil in theCabin and Flight Deck Supply Air on USCommercial Aircraft, found that 470 re-ported incidents from January 1, 2006,until June 30, 2007, involved oil or hy-draulic fluid, or an average of 0.86 fumeevents per day. The operational impact of such incidents is substantial: 57 percentof the in-flight incidents resulted in theaircraft’s diversion to another airport,and six percent resulted in aborted take-offs or landings. The study also foundthat fume events may be underreportedto the Federal Aviation Administration(FAA); of the 115 fume events involvingoil or hydraulic fluid that AFA-CWA members reported to their airlines, only16 were reported to the FAA.

Even with this potential underreport-ing, the FAA is sufficiently concernedabout the health consequences of bleed-air fume events that it recently commis-sioned a reference guide for health-careproviders. This guide, authored princi-pally by occupational medicine expert Dr.Robert Harrison, MD, MPH, of Univer-sity of California at San Francisco, de-scribes in detail the medical protocol thatphysicians, including emergency roompersonnel, should follow in diagnosingand treating toxic-air events in airplanes.The guide concludes: “The most com-mon symptoms reported are acute respi-ratory, neurological, systemic, and/orpsychiatric symptoms. These typicallyoccur within minutes to a few hours fol-lowing the contaminated bleed-air event.Symptoms vary depending on the dura-tion and magnitude of exposure, plus in-dividual factors. Chronic and sometimesdelayed neurological, psychiatric, respira-






JANUARY 2010

tory, systemic, and dermal symptomshave been reported.” The complete refer-ence guide is available at

www.ohrca.org/healthguide.html.

Aircraft manufacturers haveignored known bleed-air risks

Despite the documented adversehealth effects of bleed-air fume events,aircraft manufacturers have continued touse dangerous and defective bleed-air fil-tration systems rather than implementinga number of alternative technologies thatcould protect passengers and crew mem-bers from toxic fumes. Indeed, 99 per-cent of civilian commercial aircraft arenot fitted with adequate filtration systemsor treatment solutions that would protectcrews and passengers from exposure tocontaminated air. However, according toThe Aviation Contaminated Air Refer-ence Manual, edited by Captain SusanMichaelis – called a “ground-breakingand seminal work” by the Royal Aus-tralian Air Force Institute of AviationMedicine – at least nine systems havebeen created that could resolve various

aspects of bleed-air contamination, if air-lines were interested in implanting thetechnologies. Honeywell, for example, is

believed to have a Boeing 767 bleed-airfiltration system sitting on the shelf; it hasbeen designed, but not implemented, be-cause Boeing has never chosen to installit. Captain Michaelis reports that themajor aircraft manufacturers have notequipped their aircraft with such filtra-tion systems because the “regulators havenot required it.”

Holding the powerfulaccountable

Terry Williams seeks to show that thefailure of regulators to insist on technolo-gies that would protect crew membersand passengers from toxins in their airsupply does not give aircraft manufactur-ers the right to poison people on theirplanes. The three bleed-air cases beingbrought by Public Justice and its co-coun-sel – the Terry Williams case, the LucyMayorga and Adriana Moravcik case, andthe Valerie Vaughn and Victoria Holstedcase – are in their early stages, but theyhold out hope that, for the first time, air-craft manufacturers will be held account-able for the immense harm that their

bleed-air ventilation systems can cause. According to Leslie Brueckner, the

lead Public Justice attorney on the case,

“It is outrageous that aircraft manufactur-ers have refused to implement technolo-gies that could prevent devastatinginjuries like those suffered by Terry

Williams and numerous other crew mem-bers and passengers. Success in this case

will finally create a financial incentive forBoeing to remove the poison from itsplanes’ air supply.” The complaint canbe found at http://publicjustice.net/Repository/Files/Williams%20Conformed%20Complaint.pdf.

Mike Withey has practiced in the courof Washington and California since gradu-

ating from USF LawSchool in 1971. He won

a $15.1 million verdict against former Philippines dictator, Ferdinand Marcos for the murder of two anti- Marcos union organizers. He specializes in public

Withey interest/human rights liti- gation, toxic torts, product

liability and consumer class actions. He isthe past-president of Public Justice and the

recipient of its Champion of Justice award 2006. He is a member of CAOC.



withey bleed air products liability actions filed against boeing and airbus plaintiff magazine

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