Can flying make you ill – really ill? This is a question of growing concern to travelers, pilots, cabin-crew unions and the authorities responsible for the health and safety of passengers.
We all know the symptoms: a dry throat, sore eyes, sinus pressure, throbbing head and swollen ankles. Call it airline cabin syndrome. It is caused by sitting for hours in cramped seats with low humidity (between zero and 15 percent) and a lack of fresh air. We all know what to do even if we don’t do it. Drink plenty of water, avoid alcohol, coffee and tea, which promote dehydration, and eat sparingly. And there are aerobic exercises you’ll find in the back of the in-flight magazines. As the airlines force-feed us food and alcohol to justify outrageous business-class fares.
Quality of air has yet to compete with seat pitch and angle of recline and in-flight cuisine in the airlines’ battle for the hearts and minds of travelers in the glossy magazines. Airlines and their regulators worldwide seem reluctant to grant air quality higher status on their safety agendas.
Worries are now being expressed about the risk of passengers and crew catching serious airborne diseases – such as nasty strains of influenza, bronchitis, tuberculosis and Legionnaires’ diseases. This is because airlines are instructing pilots to save fuel by turning off one or more of their air-conditioning packs – especially after the meal when people are sleeping, thus reducing the amount of fresh air brought into the cabin and re-circulating more stale air.
But that’s only part of the story. The most sinister cause of ill health in the air is evidence now emerging that cabin air is dangerously contaminated with volatile organophosphates from the chemical breakdown of engine lubricants and hydraulic fluids. (Trimethylolpropane phosphate is a potent neurotoxin.) It is clear from copies of internal studies that aircraft manufacturers have know of this hazard for several years.
Organophosphates (OPs) – developed in World War 11 as a by-product of nerve gas technology – are used in pesticides. They work by interfering with the functioning of the central nervous system. People exposed to large doses are known to suffer a range of violent symptoms, some of them fatal, but chronic effects of low doses or of exposure over long periods of time are little understood. Many scientists are convinced that the mysterious Gulf War syndrome resulted from troops being exposed to OPs. Some are convinced that that the presence of OPs in our diet and in the environment – such as aircraft cabins – cause long-term damage to health.
An attorney for the Association of Flight Attendants in Seattle, says: ‘There are some very dirty aircraft out there and we have some very sick flight attendants. If they were Mexican farm workers in the Rio Grande, they’d have the right to be tested; but flight attendants and passengers don’t get that right: the airplane cabin is the only unregulated workplace in America with no standards that protect passengers and crew. The military have known of this problem for 20 years and have changed the type of hydraulic fluid they use. This is not being done in commercial aviation: the aerospace manufacturers, the airlines and the authorities have been keeping this dirty little secret.
‘Scientific studies going back to the late 1970s have demonstrated the problem of organophosphate contamination – including a 1983 FAA [U.S. Federal Aviation Administration] study. And there are thousands of cases of neuro-toxicity. But there’s been an active effort to keep this information out of the public eye. The Federal Government, the British and the Canadians, have all been sitting on this. Why? Because the authorities, along with NIOSH [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] and the airlines, have been in the hip pocket of the aerospace manufacturers.
‘There’s a parallel disinformation campaign to make airborne diseases the focus of concern about cabin air. Let’s talk about disease, that’s the plan; they want to hide the real cause. People think they’ve got flu – it’s not flu, it’s low-level organophosphate poisoning: respiratory problems, sinus infections, nausea, loss of memory and motor control, vomiting, diarrhoea and cramps. Physicians don’t recognize it because they’re not looking for it. They should give people a cholinesterase test for organophosphate poisoning.
At 30,000 feet (9,150 meters) the atmosphere in a plane has to be artificially created. At that altitude, the cabin is pressurized to 8,000 feet, the equivalent of sitting on a mountain top, except for the healthy breeze. Outside air is too cold and too thin for us to breathe. So the aircraft ventilation systems draw in air and bring it to the correct temperature and pressure (by mixing hot engine air with outside cold air) and remove a lot of moisture, as high humidity can cause aircraft corrosion.
Planes built before the early 1980s provided a complete change of fresh cabin air about once every three minutes. Modern aircraft supply a mix of fresh and re-circulated air, and the change rate can be as low as once every 10 minutes.
In some aircraft, such as Boeing 757s, the air is half fresh and half recycled, and the mix cannot be changed. In other aircraft, such as Boeing 747s, pilots can choose whether to operate the air-conditioning units at ‘normal’ or ‘reduced’ flow (reducing the amount of fresh air by a half to two thirds) or shutting off one of the three ventilation packs completely.
Airlines can save up to two percent of fuel costs, representing millions of dollars for a large airline, by cutting in half the amount of fresh air they bring into the cabin – thereby re-circulating 50 percent of cabin air. Turning a pack off not only saves fuel, but also reduces noise in the cabin.
Whatever class you fly, the quality of the air will be the same – although the cockpit crew gets a separate source of cold fresh air, partly because of the heat generated by instrument panels and electrically heated windows. Pilots get about 150 cubic feet of fresh air a minute per person; first class gets 50 cfm a person, and economy gets less than 7cfm.
The quality of re-circulated air depends on the efficiency of catalytic air filters and how often they are changed. (A short dry cough is typical of high ozone concentration – along with eye discomfort, nose and throat irritation and headache.) The new generation of HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Air) filters are said to remove at least 99.97 percent of all air particles 0.3 microns in size – which includes large bacteria but excludes viruses.
Even HEPA filters cannot eliminate organophosphates from cabin air. There is evidence that the filters themselves can be a source of contamination when heavy molecules from, say, hydraulic fluid accumulate in the filters (and coat the inside of the air plenum, or air shafts), to be subsequently released into recirculated cabin air. There are cases where HEPA filters have caught fire in the plane, releasing contaminated air into the cabin.
Evidence that poor air quality may cause serious disease is mainly circumstantial. This is due to a lack of research and the difficulty of tracking passengers after a flight and an incubation period of three to four days, which means that people don’t always link illness with a particular flight. Plus, there are no international standards on air quality, except for levels of carbon monoxide, ozone and carbon dioxide.
The FAA has set the maximum concentration of carbon monoxide at 50 parts per million (and ozone at 0.1 ppm, with a 0.25 ppm ceiling) and has proposed lowering the maximum concentration of carbon dioxide from 30,000 parts per million to 5,000 parts. The Civil Aviation Authority in Britain says it will follow suit. But that figure is still five times higher than the comfort guidelines for buildings. Pilots report that carbon dioxide levels are rarely controlled.
Paradoxically, smoke-free flights may have exacerbated the problem. Smoke is a visible pollutant, so you needed much more air to disperse it. On nonsmoking flights people don’t notice the pollution so much, so you can turn down the air-conditioning.
Dr Richard Dawood, an expert on travel medicine and author of ‘Travelers’ Health,’ says: ‘Re-circulated air is filtered with varying degrees of efficiency in taking out tiny particles, depending on who you believe, the plane manufacturers or the airlines. But in the days of smoking flights you could still smell smoke in the front of the plane from re-circulated air, not just smoke wafting in through the open parts. So filters may not be terribly efficient.
‘The best documented cases of disease transmission have been when the plane has been on the ground for a long time, when you don’t even have enough power to get any fresh air coming in – it’s all re-circulated. You only need a few of those 200 or 300 people to have a transmittable disease and there’s a moderate chance of catching it.
‘Once you’re in the air, you are even more vulnerable to catching things because of removal of moisture in your respiratory passages due to the very low humidity – air comes in to the cabin at zero humidity and goes out at maybe five to 10 percent. Your mucous surfaces dry out, which makes it easier for germs to bed in and make themselves comfortable.’
A spokesman for the civil aviation section of the International Transport Workers Federation, in London, says: ‘We’re not alarmist, but cabin air quality is a growing problem. Air quality has been deteriorating consistently year on year. There is a breed of complaints of extreme dizziness, nausea, hypoxia, or breathlessness, headache and loss of motor control, during and after flights.
‘There’s no doubt that pilots do turn off air-conditioning packs to save fuel, but whether there are major health risks due to that is still an open question. None of the airlines will provide data on how much air is re-circulated. Pilots are not obliged to report this. And except for carbon dioxide levels, there are no legal limits for contaminants.
‘We’re establishing a worldwide task-force to look at cabin air standards. There has been a move in Congress for an enquiry into air cabin quality. The outcome is that we have reached an agreement with Boeing to put that legislative action on hold in return for a $2 million research study on cabin environment with independent experts, including us and the Association of Flight Attendants in the United States on an advisory panel to oversee that research.’
The report was due by the end of 1999.
Chris Witkowski at the Association of Flight Attendants in Seattle, says: ‘Boeing offered to do this study to create more time in view of the interest in Congress. I think they wanted to have a buy in from us, so that whatever they came up with, we’d be kind of backed into a corner to go along with whatever they came up with. In discussions with them about the study, they were never very forthcoming with this kind of information, which tells me that they’re just trying to cover up this problem. And by looking at other things, like seat comfort, trying to get away from health issues.
‘We’ve had this problem with air quality since the late 1970s, early 1980s, and there never seems to be a resolution. What we’re looking at right now are a large number of complaints for which the industry has professed they really don’t understand
the cause. We have documentary evidence that the industry has known for a long time about the danger of organophosphate poisoning from the chemical breakdown of lubricating oils and hydraulic fluids. We are concerned that the FAA has trusted the industry to take care of these kind of problems instead of taking a more active role in the area of cabin-crew and passenger health.
‘I don’t know how this is going to play out, but certainly it is intolerable and unacceptable that the potential for chemical contamination has never been looked at. Around 60 percent of aircraft accidents are due to pilot error. The reason the military doesn’t use the same types of organic lubricants and fluids as civil aviation is because of the effect on pilots. Since the U2 incident with Gary Powers, they changed to synthetic fluids.
‘We have been in support of bringing more outside air into the cabin, so that you can dilute viruses, bacteria and so on. But we must make sure that the air we bring in is not contaminated by organophosphates. That is something that has to be addressed up-front and publicly. Airlines must produce maintenance records of engine systems and filtration and catalytic converters used to filter air coming into the cabin to determine if there has been loss or leakage of fluid. And then to see what corrective procedures were implemented.
‘We have to be careful not to jump into saying what needs to be done until we know more about the extent and nature of the problem. The bottom line is that we need to come up with regulations and policies that make sense on the quality of cabin air.’
Roger Collis 2000 New York Times
Airborne between Paris and Hong Kong on a Global Airlines Boeing 2000ER, John and Jane Harbinger are lingering over lunch in the gourmet restaurant on the top deck (not much point in fast food on a 16-hour flight) figuring how they’re going to spend the rest of the afternoon. Jane decides on a soothing séance in the beauty parlor: John will make a few calls from the business center and polish his presentation. They’ll meet for drinks at six in the suite before dinner. ‘Would sushi hit the spot? I’ll book a table downstairs.’ John asks a passing ‘skycop’ for directions. ‘Head down the main corridor towards the tail and take the elevator down to the bottom deck.’
Planes such as this three-deck 1,000-seat Goliath – which entered service in 2015 – are derived from the 600-seat super jumbos promised (or threatened) by Airbus and Boeing in 1999. They are flying villages, allowing infinite scope for social congress, with half a dozen restaurant concessions – from classical French to McDonalds’ junk food – casinos, shops, cyber-cafes with Internet access, and health clubs. About the only things missing are a pool and an outside jogging track. But you never know!
There is no such thing these days as first, business or economy class. The price you pay depends on your choice of seating, cuisine and entertainment along with the kind of service you want on the ground. Accommodation ranges from standard cattle class and ergonomic sleeper seats with more personal space to air-conditioned cabins with beds, bathroom and butler service, that convert to a daytime lounge. For an extra charge, the airline will deliver a container to your home or office, transport you through the airport and load you onto the plan. Some tycoons have converted their offices into flight containers, re-creating the private railroad cars of a century ago – the ultimate in seamless travel.
Many people travel ‘a la carte.’ You book a seat or cabin and pay extra for meals and in-flight facilities and lounges, limos and other trimmings on the ground. Traveling cattle class is no longer much of an ordeal. You only have to stay in your seat for take-off and landing; the rest of the time you can move around freely. Skycops patrol the crowded aisles ready to deal with unruly or abusive passengers who can threaten not only the well being of other passengers but the safety of the aircraft. After all, on a long-haul flight you can be in the air for up to 18 hours – almost long enough to get married, start a family and get divorced, although not necessarily in that order. Some enterprising agents are using reservations computers to help people choose in-flight companions. They punch in your high-altitude likes and dislikes and match you up with a suitable seatmate.
Global Airlines is one of three mega-carriers that together share 80 percent of the world air travel market – the culmination of the giant airline alliances and code-sharing deals that carved up the skies in the late 1990s. These compete with consortia of regional airlines in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, along with half a dozen long-haul carriers mainly serving the business market.
Code sharing, whereby two or more airlines operate the same flight, and ‘block seat’ arrangements, whereby one airline sells seats on another airline’s flights, became commonplace by 2000. The abundance of space on the superjumbos allowed several airlines to share the same plane with their own fares, flight attendants, in-flight cuisine and service.
This led to the concept of the ‘virtual’ airline. You don’t need to own aircraft and infrastructure when you can ‘brand’ your own cabin in a superjumbo. Travel agents can buy blocks of seats (and hotel rooms) and market them under their own brands to corporate customers.
Since 1999, superjumbos – along with advanced technology for better control of the airways with new satellite navigation systems and new airports and terminals – have diminished the specter of gridlock in the skies by quadrupling air traffic capacity since 1999. But the challenge was daunting. Since 1999, air traffic has been growing at around 10 percent a year.
Thus the number of passengers has doubled every seven years, reaching a staggering 20 billion in 2020. Where are all these people going? And, more to the point, why do they all seem to be going with me?
The growth of tourism in China has been phenomenal. The Chinese government set the ball rolling when it cut the working week to five days, giving the nation’s workers an extra half-day off a week.
This was even better news for the travel trade, because – assuming a workforce of 750 million from a total population of 1.2 billion – it meant an extra 15 billion days’ leisure time coming on stream. And with more disposable income and the liberalization of passports, the Chinese have become international travelers.
According to the World Tourism Organization, China now generates more out-bound tourism than any country in the world apart from Japan, Germany and the United States. China has also become the world’s top tourist destination with 137 million visitors in 2020.
The world’s top 30 airports will handle more than 16 billion passengers this year. The traditional mega-hubs such as Chicago O’Hare, Los Angeles International, Atlanta, London Heathrow, Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok and Singapore’s Changi are bursting at the seams, each handling around 200 million passengers a year. But an airport building boom, especially in Asia, has added capacity. China has built more than 50 new airports since 1999.
Meanwhile, the creation of ‘wayports,’ or new hubs, in remote parts of Norway and Siberia has siphoned off a large amount of connecting traffic. More than 30 percent of the people milling around Heathrow, for example, were simply trying to get somewhere else.
Supersonic travel has become space age with Orbitol, a 50-passenger space plane that travels in low earth orbit enabling it to fly from London to Sydney in 45 minutes. Unlike the old space shuttles, Orbitol takes off and lands under its own power. After accelerating through Mach 5 to 80, 000 feet, the plane leaves the atmosphere, continues to accelerate and becomes a satellite itself after reaching 250,000 feet – around four times the cruising altitude of Concorde – with an orbital velocity of Mach 25 to 30.
More down to earth, high-speed maglev (magnetically levitated) trains traveling at 300 miles per hour have replaced air travel on journeys of up to 500 miles, releasing slots at major airports, most of which have train stations, for long-haul traffic.
Regional airlines serve ‘thinner routes,’ enabling business travelers to avoid mega-hubs. Thus ‘regional long-haul’ services allow travelers to fly point-to-point between cities such as Manchester and Osaka, Seattle and Perth, Stuttgart and San Francisco.
Mega-hubs, with a larger daily population than many major cities, are no longer a means to an end but an end in itself, destinations in their own right. They form a worldwide network of alternative cities – what you might call the terrestrial equivalent of space stations – with their own business communities and civic amenities, hotels and conference centers. Who needs to go downtown when you are already there? Many people don’t travel to cities any more, just to airports.
John Harbinger, on-line to his office in Broken Springs, Colorado, asks himself a routine question: whether he really needed to make this trip.
Technology enables (and requires) him to be totally wired at all times. The No. 1 rule for business travelers is wherever you are, always to be on the phone to somewhere else. So why travel? John rationalizes that this is a working vacation – a chance to bring Jane along. He’s looking forward to a round of golf with his Chinese associates. And he and Jane plan to take off for a five-day airship cruise among the Hong Kong islands.
Modern airships are safe, comfortable, and environmentally friendly, as they sail and hover less than 100 feet above the ground. An airship cruise is a spectacular way to see many wonders of the world, such as the Amazon and what’s left of the rain forests in Brazil and Peru, chateaux of the Loire, fly along the Nile to see the pyramids, explore Venice or make an air safari in Kenya.
‘Virtual conferencing,’ has done away with the need for many business trips. A 100-inch (256 centimeter) illuminated high-resolution screen with ‘wrap-around’ sound makes everyone seem life-like and gives the illusion that you’re in the same room. This means that you can participate normally in the discussion; using the same body language.
Travel was in danger of becoming an end in itself. I am therefore I travel: I travel therefore I am. Travel is about human interaction, hands-on experience. Getting the best return on your ‘interaction expense’ is a trade-off between cost in terms of time, money and hassle and the opportunity of staying doing something more productive somewhere else.
Of course, there’s sometimes a need to be somewhere in person – the eye contact, the real, compared to the cybernetic, handshake, the impromptu meeting and, of course, the social dimension can be pure gold. It is not something you can quantify; it’s intuitive, gut feeling. Who goes to a conference to listen to the speakers? You can pick up a transcript or receive it live in your office. It’s real-time networking that counts.
In the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Homeric hero, Ulysses, back in 1842:
‘I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch where thro’
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.’
But business travel is less poetic and a good deal less sentimental. Which is why John Harbinger makes fewer trips these days. This excursion with Jane is a fairly rare experience in real-time reality. Like most other road warriors, John embraces the new ‘travel avoidance’ technology, such as virtual conferencing and virtual meetings in real or ‘displaced’ time, with chiliastic zeal.
The technology is rooted in voice recognition software developed back in the late 90s that enabled you to call a computer from anywhere in the world, check your e-mail your voice-mail and faxes, either by computer or through the telephone. You could convert them from voice to text, or vice versa, and re-direct them by any medium.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence make it possible to hold an open-ended discussion through a computer. The machine not only understands the meaning of what you say but replies to you in a normal voice – which might be the digitalized voice of a real person.
John Millennium, along with his colleagues, has had his voice ‘digitalized’ and stored on-line. Early computer-generated voices sounded robotic because words were mechanically strung together into sentences, thereby losing the rhythm of the dialogue; whereas digitalized voices are produced by recording entire sentences, then shoehorning in numbers and letters of the alphabet.
Voices are recorded in three ways. If you say the number nine, for instance, at the beginning of a word, it sounds different from if you say it in the middle or the end. The same applies to words and phrases.
It’s hard to detect a digitalized voice in displaced time from a real voice in real time. Meetings can thus be conducted in real or displaced time. You program your responses, to say, a budget meeting, in advance and your digitalized voice conducts a dialogue on your behalf. Cognitive programs are being designed whereby John can participate vicariously at several meetings while he is away. It beats the old way of having answering machines talk to one another, or batting e-mails back and forth, communication lost in fruitless volleys of non sequiturs.
Back in their suite, the Harbingers are mentally packing their bags for an ‘out of this world’ space vacation. They have been armchair astronauts for years and are looking forward to five days in a Disney Space Resort 300 miles above Earth. They will take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a NASA space shuttle adapted to carry 40 tourists, experiencing weightless for about 15 minutes.
The resort accommodates 300 people in cruise-ship luxury. It takes an hour and a half to make a complete orbit of the Earth, spinning like a roulette wheel at about one revolution a minute, thus developing artificial gravity.
You stay in an outer ring, where you experience about half of normal gravity – just about half your normal weight – so you can use bathroom facilities and such at practically normal conditions. A central column section has zero gravity. This is the entertainment and recreation center, which guests can visit for an hour or so at a time. There are windows in the central column to view the Earth.
There are lots of entertainment possibilities at zero gravity, including a gym with padded walls. Astronauts have found that blood that is normally drawn down to your legs is released and drifts upwards. You become thinner, your chest expands by two to three inches, your face fills out and wrinkles disappear.
While Jane muses about a second honeymoon in space, John is thinking about the final frontier in space travel – to experience Einstein’s paradox of relativity, that if you travel faster than the speed of light, you are younger when you get back than when you left. Daunting implications for a career in international business.
If you’re feeling under the weather on your next business trip, don’t blame it all on jet lag, travel fatigue, the recalcitrance of your sparring partners or a subliminal hangover. Put it down to the quality of the air you breathe. There’s junk air as well as junk food. You may be suffering from a deficiency of negative ions.
Ions are naturally occurring air molecules that carry a positive or negative charge. The outdoor air concentration varies with the weather, altitude, pollution, time of day and season, but normally consists of 1,000 negative ions and 1,200 positive ions per cubic centimeter. If the air is abnormally high in positive ions, or low in ions of another polarity – which is often the case in aircraft cabins, cars, trains and air-conditioned buildings – you may be prone to headaches, nausea and irritability. On the other hand, air which is rich in negative ions – such as you find in the mountains, besides flowing water and after a thunderstorm – can make you feel good. This is why a growing number of travelers are taking ionizers with them to charge the depleted in cars and hotel rooms with negative ions.
Weren’t ionizers discredited back in the 1950s when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration prohibited their sale for anything other than air-cleaning applications? They were indeed, and for good cause. The notion that ions could influence health and behavior lost credence as a result of dubious research reports and extravagant claims by manufacturers. But recent ion research in the United States, Israel and England is helping to make ionizers scientifically respectable.
At any rate, sales of ionizers are taking off. A British firm, Mountain Breeze, claims to be selling an average of 1,000 ionizers a week. Says marketing director Stephen Cross: ‘There’s a massive reawakening of interest in ionizers. You should see the testimonials we get; we’re doubling our sales every year. In the U.S. you still can’t say anything more than that they clean the air. There is empirical evidence that people feel better in an environment which is high in negative ions. We still don’t know why, but we’re still gradually building up the research base.’
An ionizer is nothing more than a high-voltage circuit which creates a high potential at the tip of a sharp needle, thereby discharging a stream of electrons which collide with air molecules to form negative ions. These then impart a negative charge to dust, pollen, water droplets and cigarette smoke suspended in the air which precipitate out to the nearest grounded surface, such as the floor and walls, by electrolytic action. You can easily test this by placing an ionizer on your desk in a smoke-filled room. The smoke rapidly clears and the ionizer is surrounded by a corona of dust which is easily swept up. If you put your hand close to an ionizer, you can actually feel the stream of electrons on the skin as a slight breeze. And it’s sometimes visible in the dark as a faint blue glow. One thing to check if you’re buying an ionizer is that it doesn’t emit ozone as a byproduct (which many early models did) as this is highly toxic in concentrations of more than a few parts per million.
Few people seriously dispute the air cleaning capacity of ionizers – they are routinely used in offices and some hospitals are installing them to help reduce cross-infection by airborne bacteria and viruses.
Studies carried out in the 1970s at the University of California and at the University of Jerusalem have demonstrated that high levels of positive ions cause the body to react as if it were under stress by stimulating the production of neuro-hormones, such as serotonin – which affects sleep and mood – and adrenalin, as well as histamine, which is associated with hay fever and other allergic reactions; whereas a preponderance of negative ions seems to contribute to a feeling of well-being.
The Jerusalem study examined the effects of the Sharav, a hot, dry wind in Israel which causes up to two thirds of the population to complain of headaches, respiratory discomfort and depression. The Sharav and similar winds, such as the Fohn in Switzerland, southern Germany and Austria and the Santa Ana in California, have a high positive ion content which may indeed cause behavioral and clinical symptoms. It has been reported that when the Fohn blows, hospitals postpone operations and the traffic accident rate soars. Joan Didion writes of the morbid effects of the Santa Ana when ‘every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.’ Raymond Chandler described the hot dry Santa Anas ‘that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.’
More recently, work by Dr Leslie Hawkins, head of the Robens Institute at the University of Surrey in England, has demonstrated that in air-conditioned buildings, where the ion count is low, the incidence of headaches, nausea and lethargy – the ‘sick building syndrome’ – suffered by occupants is significantly reduced by installing an air ionizer.
Hawkins conducted extensive double-blind occupational studies to determine if positive or negative atmospheric ion levels could influence actual performance levels as well as attitudes among computer operators. He demonstrated that a majority reported feeling more comfortable and alert when the de-ionized environment in which they had been working was replenished with a natural level of negative ions. His studies also revealed that this replenished air increased work efficiency and productivity with a concurrent reduction in reported symptoms of nausea, stress, fatigue and dizziness.
If you fancy doing some research of your own, there’s a wide choice of ionizers on the market, including portable ones on the market, including portable ones for hotel rooms and car models that plug into lighter sockets.
Whether or not it makes you feel better, snorting the right sort of ions could be a great way to break the ice at your next meeting.
Roger Collis 1986 International Herald Tribune
[Another ‘blast from the past;’ an archive story from my forthcoming collection, ‘Management Man.’ www.rogercollis.co.uk]
In my long-ago corporate days, when we were ruled by guilt and anxiety and card-carrying members of Workaholics Anonymous (two-ulcer men in three-ulcer jobs), the notion of a sabbatical, or time out, was a cruel joke. Sabbaticals were for tenured business school professors, or freshly fired vice presidents, floating down to earth on golden parachutes; or the silver-haired rich with time on their hands. (Hell, we did not dare take our annual two-week vacation. You were stressed out and got on with it.)
Fast-forward to today with news that a new wave of young stressed-out executives in their late 20’s to early 30’s has joined the 16 to 24 year-olds, who see traveling around the world in the ‘gap-year’ as a last chance to take time out before starting work, or before or after college; often seen as a ‘rite of passage’ before settling into a career.
This is the finding of a survey of 2,013 British executives, aged 26 to 34, carried out by YouGov on behalf of the Bradford & Bingley building society, the second largest in the country.
Nigel Asplin, group general insurance director at Bradford & Bingley, says, ‘Traveling has become increasingly popular at an age when life itself has become a “stress zone.” People are using extended breaks to relieve work pressure. Having worked for a few years, they feel they deserve it.’
Nearly half of adults (49 percent) believe that the best time to travel is once one has some life experience, rather than during their student years; 46 percent see extended breaks as the chance to review their lifestyle and attitudes.
While this group would obviously have more money than students for travel, half still intend to do it in ‘backpacker’ style, staying in cheap accommodation and having a daily food budget while still enjoying sports and cultural activities. However, there are some trappings of their affluent lifestyle they wouldn’t leave behind: 81 percent would take their digital camera with them, 18 percent their iPOD and 17 percent their PalmPilot. Most popular destinations include Australia and New Zealand, Canada, United States, and South America.
Brett Shepperson, 32, left his job, building a mobile phone network, leveraged his mortgage, and with the #25,000 proceeds took off with his girlfriend for a year traveling around the world, spending an average of four weeks in 13 countries. They scuba dived in the Galapagos Islands, skied in Argentina, and climbed the Cotopaxi mountain in Ecuador. A high point was a Spanish language school in Quito, Ecuador, where they met a rich mix of people, teachers, executives, writers…
‘I came back a different person, more confident, more laid-back, new perspective and mental well-being,’ Shepperson says. ‘I have a new job now as telecom project manager in Norwich.’
Fiona Smith and Justin Harvey gave up their jobs and a joint income of #60,000 to backpack across South America for six months, traveling through Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. While they are on a tight budget, they still plan to splurge occasionally. Harvey, who has worked as an IT consultant in London for eight years, looks for respite and ‘a different pace of life’ for a while.
I should be so lucky. I’ll settle for a sabbatical long week-end.
More than four out of ten (43 percent) of affluent Americans (those with household incomes in excess of $150,000) took at least one international leisure trip last year, according to the ‘2004 Portrait of Affluent Travelers’ published by Yesawich, Peppardine, Brown and Russell in Orlando, Florida, co-publishers with Yankelovich Partners of the Business Travel Monitor.
Western Europe tops the list of places visited by a wide margin (82 percent). Within Europe, the preferred destinations are Italy (33 percent), England (28 percent) and France (20 percent). The Caribbean is the favorite, with nearly 20 percent of respondents; followed by Mexico (16 percent); Australia (15 percent); the Far East (13 percent); South/Central America (11 percent); Canada (10 percent); South Pacific (9 percent); the Middle East (5 percent) and Africa (4 percent).
Thailand and Singapore ranked top among countries visited by Asian travelers in the first half of 2004, according to the MasterIndex of Travel, a survey of 6,000 travelers in 13 markets across the Asia-Pacific region, conducted by MasterCard International.
Both countries were the top regional destinations for 16 percent of respondents with China coming in third at 13 percent. But China (23 percent) was the most frequently visited country for business travel, followed by Singapore (16 percent) and Hong Kong (13 percent).
British Airways claims to be the first airline in the UK to enable passengers who check-in online to print their own boarding pass at home or in the office. The pass, printed on A4 paper, carries a bar-code containing flight details. Passengers with hand baggage only go direct to security, where their bar-code is checked with a scanner, by-passing the need to go to a check-in desk or a self-service check-in kiosk. Passengers with bags to check in can use a ‘fast baggage drop.’
The scheme began as a trial a month ago at London City where forty-seven percent of BA passengers checking-in on-line are choosing to print their own boarding passes. The scheme has been extended to certain flights from Heathrow and Manchester. BA says it plan to roll out the service across most of its global network within the next 18 months.
Executive Club members can check-in at www.ba.com 24 hours and other passengers 12 hours before departure.
The Mileage Converter, a new tool from the stable of FFP guru Randy Peterson’s Frequent Flyer Services, at the WebFlyer.com site shows frequent travelers how to transfer miles, kilometers or points between any two programs. Users select a program they would like to transfer miles out of, enter the mileage amount they would like to transfer, and select a program into which they would like to transfer the miles, and the Mileage Converter finds all possible ways to make the transaction, indicating the ‘conversion rate’ for the miles/points between both programs.