So should you rethink your travel plans? We aren’t, and we don’t think you should, either. Understanding why can teach us a lot about how to read health headlines like this one.
Spending hundreds of hours among the clouds each year, air crew absorb more radiation, on average, than workers in any other job in the U.S.—including those generating nuclear power and our colleagues who work with radiation for medical purposes. This type of ionizing radiation, in sufficient doses, can damage DNA and give rise to cancer. What has never been clear is whether the amount aircrew accumulate over a career is enough to increase cancer risk above other occupations.
The approach rested on simple logic. If cosmic radiation were truly driving cancer among air crew, the signal should appear specifically in the cancers that radiation is known to cause (breast, prostate, melanoma, and certain leukemias), and the signal should not appear in cancers like colon cancer that aren’t caused by this type of radiation. We would also expect to see higher rates of radiation-associated cancers among other types of workers exposed to radiation, like nuclear technologists. Meanwhile, unless something about aviation other than flying was associated with these cancers, we wouldn’t expect to see higher rates in aviation workers who remain on the ground, like aircraft mechanics and assemblers.
That internal consistency—seeing the types of cancers we expected in the workers we predicted would be most at risk, with control groups behaving precisely as expected—makes it unlikely that the pattern arose by chance. But as striking as these patterns are, this study, by itself, is not iron-clad proof of cause and effect. Our data cannot measure how much radiation any individual actually received. Occupations are sometimes recorded incorrectly on death certificates. People at higher baseline risk for this type of cancer may be more likely to work as pilots or flight attendants. Air crew face other hazards, from disrupted circadian rhythms to in-cabin exposures, that we could not fully account for.
If anyone should take note, then, it is not passengers but the agencies charged with protecting the people who work at altitude. The Federal Aviation Administration already recognizes aircrew as occupationally exposed to radiation. Yet unlike nuclear workers, or air crew in Europe, U.S. pilots and flight attendants are subject to no federal dose limits and no requirement that their exposure even be monitored.
So the next time a flight attendant hands you a coffee at 30,000 feet, there’s no need to fret over the tiny radiation dose you are taking on by being up in the sky. But do consider the doses they take on, day after day, and whether we are doing enough to look after the people who spend their careers somewhere the rest of us are only passing through.
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