Australian airport employees will this week join workers across the world to protest low wages and insecure work as a report shows poor working conditions are affecting safety and security in air transport. The report by the International Transport Workers’ Federation is being published as aviation executives gather for a global air transport summit in […]
Panama, a small nation of just three million, has the largest shipping fleet in the world, greater than those of the US and China combined. Aliyya Swaby investigates how this tiny Central American country came to rule the waves. (…) Cheaper foreign labour Most merchant ships flying Panama’s flag belong to foreign owners wishing to […]
Prospect has called for the UK’s aviation regulator to be split up, in a letter to transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin, amid concerns that safety is no longer its paramount concern. The union, which represents more than 5,000 aviation specialists, reached the conclusion that the Civil Aviation Authority’s regulatory functions should be separated after extensive research […]
Your plane is on fire. You can see smoke billowing outside the windows. Flight attendants are screaming to evacuate. So you unbuckle your seat belt, stand up, open the overhead compartment and make sure you grab that nice piece of luggage you brought with you. I mean, you can’t possibly let it burn! Wait, what? […]
Three ITF affiliates have joined the federation in praising the actions of firefighters and the crew on board British Airways flight 2276 in evacuating 172 people when the plane caught fire before take-off this morning at Las Vegas airport. Many of the cabin crew are members of the ITF-affiliated Unite union based at Gatwick airport […]
By Camilla Turner It is an illness caused by exposure to contaminated air in aircraft – known as a “fume event”. Commercial passenger jets have a system that compresses air from its engines and uses it to pressurise the cabin. However, this can malfunction, causing excess oil particles to enter the supply. The term “aerotoxic […]
Airlines are increasingly using zero-hour contracts, pay-to-fly schemes, and temporary employment agencies based outside the EU to hire pilots and cut costs, practices which undermine passenger safety and social standards, a report by the University of Ghent has found. According to the report, which was financed by the European Commission, airlines have turned to “creative […]
Flying increases exposure to UV rays that could cause melanoma Pilots and flight attendants are twice as likely to suffer from the skin cancer melanoma when compared to the general population, according to a new Journal of the American Medical Association study. Looking at data compiled from more than 260,000 people in 19 previous studies, […]
