ritish Airways has been accused of downplaying an incident that left 25 cabin crew in hospital after toxic fumes leaked into the cabin of a San Francisco-bound flight.
The plane was forced to divert to Calgary after the pilot told air traffic control that “toxic gas-type fumes” had filled the cabin - a recording of the conversation has been released and can be heard below. The union Unite, which represents more than 20,000 cabin crew, said that British Airways called the incident an “odour event”, misrepresenting, it said, the seriousness of the situation.
The union says that BA is attempting to spin the nature of such instances and “manipulate” statistics “to downplay how widespread the problem really is in the industry”. It said that it could mean the true number of times cabin crew and passengers are forced to breathe contaminated cabin air could be much higher than recorded