Air Safety Organization Update
Fume Exposure Event Guidance Now Available to ALPA Members
ALPA’s Air Safety Organization (ASO) has been working on ways to mitigate the risks associated with onboard smoke and fume events. As part of this effort, ALPA’s ASO and Engineering & Air Safety Department have developed a website, www.alpa.org/fume, with guidance for pilots in the event that they’re involved in a fume-exposure event. The guidance includes recommended steps for flight crews following airborne or flight deck exposure to smoke, contaminated bleed air, or invisible gaseous fumes or odors.
The website provides flight crews with a downloadable “Fume Exposure Health Care Provider Guide,” an IATA smoke and fumes reporting form, and an IATA medical guidance document on cabin air quality events. The health-care provider guide gives health-care professionals the information necessary to ensure that crewmembers are appropriately tested and treated.
The reporting form is intended to be completed by ALPA pilots who’ve encountered smoke/fume events and forwarded to EAS@alpa.org to allow the ASO and Engineering & Air Safety Department to track and document events experienced by ALPA members.
ASLs Participate in Denver Emergency Drill
In late July, Capt. Glen Clemons (United) and Capt. Sandra Widdows (Frontier), ALPA airport safety liaisons (ASLs), participated in a full-scale emergency drill at Denver International Airport. The drill simulated an accident involving a B-747 that encountered birds on departure and crashed on the north side of the airport, both on and off airport property. As a result, multiple agencies from adjacent cities responded to the simulated crash in addition to local hospitals, the Red Cross, and partnering airlines.
On site, volunteer participants took their places in a field adjacent to the fire department’s training facility. Responding firefighters in full gear worked first to extinguish the burning “fuselage.” Having secured the scene, the firefighters then began triage, directing the walking “wounded” to emergency services. A friends-and-family reconciliation area, located in Terminal A, began the reconciliation process for passengers not transported to area hospitals.
Widdows played the role of the first officer involved in the accident, and Clemons served as a CIRP first responder. Both parties contacted ALPA on the simulated Accident/Serious Incident Hotline and spoke to an Engineering & Air Safety Department engineer who coordinated the ALPA response with the two pilots.
ASLs play a vital role within ALPA’s Air Safety Organization. To learn more about this program or to volunteer, contact the Engineering & Air Safety Department at EAS@alpa.org or 1-800-424-2470. View more photos of the drill.
ALPA Takes Part in Weather Conference
In mid-July, ALPA participated in the Friends and Partners in Aviation Weather (FPAW) two-day annual summer event hosted by the NTSB at its conference center in Washington, D.C. FPAW is a core group of subject-matter experts from the aviation weather community that has convened for the past 19 years to discuss weather technology and procedures status and progress among government and industry professionals.
During a panel discussion titled “Weather User Panel,” Capt. Steve Jangelis (Delta), ALPA’s Air Safety Organization Aviation Safety chairman, provided ALPA’s perspective on the use of critical aviation weather information that pilots need to safely perform their duties.
Jangelis described how meteorological surface observations are needed to compute takeoff and landing performance and emphasized the importance of PIREPs. He also gave a glimpse into Delta’s Flight Viewer app, which provides pilots with real-time graphical turbulence observations and forecasts on the flight deck.
