Originally Posted by
Chief Brody
Well think about this. The FAA is one of the few government agencies that is regulated directly by Congress. And who controls Congress?? Big corporations, including big airlines. Has anyone reached out to Erin Brokovich? Don't laugh!! She is good at fanning the flames in these type cases.
We pay plenty of money to our unions, they have a louder voice. They choose instead to waste time/money on cockpit doors and fancy hotels for themselves. They should be lobbying for environmental workplace safety such as chronic toxic exposures (get a good dose of TCPs, diesel exhaust, etc.when doing a walk around?) and radiation exposure (how many pilots are getting cancer?)...
http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2013...2-s300-c85.jpg
One of the biggest problems we encounter as pilots fighting against exposure to radiation is the notion that there is a safe dosage of radiation. There is actually no safe dosage. Some radiation such as alpha particles are easy to protect against since they can be stopped with a piece of paper, The cockpit window, your clothing, or sunglasses. However, are there radiation such as gamma rays and x-rays will penetrate anything. It only takes one subatomic particle to mutate the DNA of one cell out of trillions and trillions of cells in your body. All of these probabilities are infinitesimally small, the effect is lethal every time. The best that you can do is lower the odds. I personally think that we should demand that our occupation does not expose us to more radiation then we would receive naturally being on the ground.
Also one more thing about the radiation dose of the aforementioned charts regarding trans continental flights: those are measured for a passenger shielded by the aircraft vessel. The radiation amount received by pilots in a relatively unshielded front end with only plexiglass is significantly higher.
Considering that, if one transcontinental flight is almost the same radiation as an x-ray, how many x-rays equivalents are you receiving a year if you do it several hundred times?
Step One is to be critical of uneducated apologists....
