Unlocking An Airborne Mystery

Pro golfer Dante Jimenez was returning home from a tournament last December on an Alaska Airlines MD-80. Minutes after the plane landed, the cabin filled with fumes.

"It just knocks me to the ground," Jimenez says. "It was like swallowing razor blades"

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Ed White, Alaska's vice president for customer relations, wrote that letter. "It is not a dangerous situation," he says. "It is certainly irritating."
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But many Alaska flight attendants see a direct link between hydraulic fluids and oil, and illnesses hundreds of them have reported since 1989. [Click Here For Incident Reports]

They believe the fluids are leaking into the plane's air conditioning system used on the ground. Their union charges: "We are consistently being exposed to low levels of toxins."

Kim Kawachi's last flight as an Alaska attendant was two years ago. In an incident report for that flight, she detailed nausea, vomiting, headache, blurred and tunnel vision, and a metallic taste in her mouth.
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"I felt like I'd been drugged," she says. "It was awful. I couldn't remember the basic things. I felt like somebody had taken an eraser to my brain."

"I just could not concentrate on the task at hand," says another flight attendant on that flight, Terri Nixon. "I'm getting ready to pass out. I couldn't see. It's like my eyes weren't focusing."

That same flight ended Nixon's 14-year flying career. The emergency room doctor who treated Nixon and Kawachi concluded a probable toxic exposure.
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Another doctor, Dr. Richard Jobe, has treated sme two dozen Alaska flight attendants and one pilot with similar symptoms. "I've diagnosed almost all of these people as having a toxic encephalopathy of unknown cause, and that just means diminished function of the brain from a toxic element," Jobe says.

Nearly all of the Alaska incidents have happened on MD-80s, which comprise half of the airline's fleet. But 60 other airlines fly MD-80. It's one of the most widely used jets in the world. The mystery: No other carrier has reported any significant number of illnesses.

"I don't have an answer as to why we're experiencing this and other carriers are not," White says.

Workers compensation claims filed by Kawachi and Nixon were denied, because they could not prove their injuries happened on the airplane.

"I was on the job when this happened to me," Kawachi says. "It makes me just outraged."

In fact, 226 similar claims have all been rejected, including that of Alaska Flight Attendant Mary Jacobs, who developed tremors after walking through a mist in the cabin of an MD-80.

"I'm concerned for those employees who are ill," Alaska's White says. "I don't know what causes their problems. Time after time after time we conduct these tests. We don't find anything that suggests any safety hazard or health hazard on board our aircraft."

And federal health investigators have been unable to find any source of toxic exposure on Alaska's planes.

The airline has settled out of court with at least five flight attendants, and more lawsuits may be filed soon. "It's about time people know what's going on," Kawachi says.

For now, it's a mystery that goes on, and these flight attendants remain grounded. "Flight attendants, we're expendable. We don't count," Nixon says.

Terri Nixon is now a waitress. Kim Kawachi is unemployed. And Mary Jacobs is on welfare.