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Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2852504 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...
- amelius 2mo agoDon't forget your lead body armor when going on long flight trips (which they can't charge you extra for).
- jader201 2mo agoThe 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-pilots-radiation-cancer-deaths https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/19/health/flight-attendants-pilo...
- dang 2mo agoThanks! I've put that link at the top and moved the paper link to the toptext.
- stefantalpalaru 2mo ago[dead]
- RajT88 2mo agoAttendants 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.
- dukeofdoom 2mo ago[flagged]
- bertil 2mo agoYour 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.
- philipallstar 2mo agoWhat problematic suggestions?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- devin 2mo ago[flagged]
- Der_Einzige 2mo ago[flagged]
- devin 2mo agoI handed it a downvote. Here's why: > Older flight attendants look really damaged by the job. First off, this is just anecdotal and I know FAs who do _not_ look "damaged by the job". So, we're off to a bad start. > The combination of irregular sleep, quite likely too much alcohol and sun in layover locations when younger. Not all FAs fly crazy schedules. This comment then makes assumptions about where younger FAs fly, and suggests they all drink too much. More conjecture to back up a weak claim without any evidence provided. > 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 OK, so this article is about radiation. That is at least addressing the topic. Calling "smelling farts" a biological hazard is borderline ridiculous. "Being around sick people" is what nurses do all day. There are _many_, _many_ professions where _being around a lot of people_ is part of the job. It does not seem particularly notable here. They end by saying that being in an enclosed space is bad for your lungs. Uh, ok. Maybe? Probably? How bad? Compared to what? Being outdoors in an area prone to air pollution?
- jader201 2mo ago> 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.
- RajT88 2mo agoI guess I am going off when a pilot spoke at my high school for career day. (Decades ago...)
- jeswin 2mo agoIn 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.
- potatoking 2mo agoThe fuselage probably has a lot less attention to shielding even if the cockpit seems very exposed.
- beembeem 2mo agoThis is peak HN. Two engineers running google searches without any primary sources speaking up about the issue.
- xeromal 2mo agoAccount created 2021
- illusive4080 1mo agoCollaboratively trying to figure out an unknown. I quite enjoy this type of interaction of strangers versus the typical arguments
- tzs 1mo agoAccording to a bit of Googling (which included LLM responses so if you need to be sure verify what follows), although flight attendants and pilots spend about the same amount of time in the air and so get the same exposure, flight attendants have fewer rest requirements and scheduling protection. This results in them working more erratic shifts with shorter rest windows, which results in more circadian rhythm disruption than in pilots. Important mechanisms in the body to suppress tumor growth and repair DNA damage are linked to circadian rhythms and are less effective when those rhythms are disrupted.
- 4d4m 2mo agoBoeing, 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 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/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/201520.pdf 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.
- seizethecheese 2mo agoThe article specifically says flight attendants are only at increased risk of radiation related cancers, but not others.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- seethishat 2mo agoI 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.
- magnetic 2mo agoThis chart has the flight & CT scan scenarios (among many other): https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/
- andrehacker 2mo agoWonderful work by Mr. XKCD (Randall Munroe). This was published in 2011 when there was "some" misinformation in the U.S. press about the Fukushima nuclear accident. Based on this chart some proposed to use "bananas" as unit of radition (equivalent to 0.1 uSv). So (from this chart) one flight from New York to LA exposes you to 400 bananas worth of radiation.
- gulfofamerica 2mo ago[dead]
- KellyCriterion 1mo agoWOW, what a cool chart! :) Thanks for the link! Didnt know that one Mammogram is that intensive, so my partner shouldnt go each year, Id guess?
- sigmoid10 2mo agoDepends on the actual scan. A head CT can be as little as one sievert while a full blown angiogramm can be more than ten sievert. A pilot can accrue 40k flight hours over his career. If 90% of that is at cruising altitude (meaning 3-6 microsievert/hour), that would be 100-200 mSv in total. That would be equivalent to more than a hundred head CTs or a dozen angios. If you need that many CTs, your lifetime cancer risk is probably your smallest concern. But you still wouldn't expose any normal human to that level of radiation.
- ViktorRay 2mo agoCancers 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.
- 1-6 2mo agoOur company shared a wall with an xray lab next door. My coworkers and I were always curious what impacts it would have to our health.
- ViktorRay 2mo agoProbably nothing if the wall was lead lined. And then there’s the inverse square law too.
- westurner 1mo agoReplacing X-Ray and CT with new imaging would reduce exposure. HIFU ultrasound arrays are already approved. Recent research here indicates that longitudinally-polarized Proca waves are usable for Angstrom-scale medical imaging and treatments including tumor lysis and DNA repair. There are apparently ways to target cancerous cells by their bio signatures in order to only target non-benign tissues. I'm happy that I kept on with this line of research long enough to realize the medical capabilities (and fire suppression) it enables; Public link: "I/Q Sampling for Signal Phase" https://share.gemini.google/rDVcVwDnWPTc https://share.gemini.google/rDVcVwDnWPTc It's a Twistor-Grassmanian mapping?
- elromulous 2mo agoI've wondered if billionaires get their jets lined with lead. Lead is notoriously heavy, but if you buy a 737 and it only ever has to fly you and a couple other people, it might be feasible. Or I guess they could just line one section where they spend the majority of the time.
- m463 2mo agohmmm... looks like there's something called ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene. "UHMWPE/hydrogen-rich benzoxazine composite (UHC) exhibits excellent cosmic radiation shielding." maybe that should be a thing.
- tomasphan 1mo agoLead is bad because the high energy particles hitting lead can multiply particle count. You’d need a significant amount, like 25cm thickness. Too much for weight limits of any airplane.
- dang 2mo ago[stub for offtopicness] (We've since changed the top link.)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Supermancho 2mo agopaywalled (even with a "free" account")
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- missedthecue 2mo agoCancer 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 0.97x 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. So 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.
- francisofascii 2mo agoI suspect they don't have regular sleep schedules, which partially explains the elevated risk. Nurses and 3rd shift workers all have elevated cancer risk.
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- LorenPechtel 1mo agoThis doesn't really say what it looks like it says. They don't have an above average risk of dying of cancer. Rather, if they die they are more likely than average to have died of cancer. Which is not exactly surprising given that the medical screenings remove many of those who would die of heart issues. What would be strange is if there wasn't a higher percentage of cancer deaths.
- kaikai 1mo ago… IF they die?
- LorenPechtel 1mo agoYou do not understand what I'm saying. To illustrate, my numbers are not meant to be accurate. Population at large, 100 red marbles (heart), 80 black marbles (cancer), 80 blue marbles (everything else). Cancer is 80/260 of the total. Medical checks, you removed 80 of those red marbles. Now you have cancer at 80/180 of the total. The percentage of cancer went up. Did the total cancer? No.
- toomanywalls 1mo agoNot an auth wall. Not a pay wall. Not even a cookie wall (Block Element! bullet ricochet noise) But a Terms of Use wall? For an article? I just wanna read it.
- jschveibinz 1mo agoA water bladder above the cockpit might help? I'm not a nuclear physicist, but I stayed at a HolInn Express last night...
- glimshe 1mo agoAccording to Gemini, radiation related cancer rates aren't higher in high elevation cities like Quito or La Paz... Shouldn't they be too? Airliners fly a lot higher but people live in these 24x7.
- ojosilva 1mo agoHigh altitude Equatorial populations and air crew exposures are different beasts. A 10h flight close to the North Pole is like living in Quito for almost a month. The type of dosage (bursts x contínuous) also matters as the body can probably accommodate more easily, but that's just me saying. Then add natural selection to that mix that should have helped prepare high-altitude populations residents for those living conditions, which will heavily skew the data. Finally, the cosmic shower has lost a lot of energy from 12,000m to say 2,500m, so the "hit" is not the same. It all may end up having an exponential effect reducing cancer rates... So a flight attendant that clocks ~700h a year, that's roughly 5 years of living in Quito in a year of flying in Sieves. Now, given that the air crew studies are not all that conclusive yet, take high-altitude populations at 5x less exposure and all these other factors I've mentioned, and they will end up having an even lower chance of showing up in any cancer studies. So... not remotely comparable.