Pilots and Flight Attendants Face a Real Cancer Risk. Frequent Flyers Shouldn’t Panic

There is a particular unease that comes from seeing that an ordinary part of life has been linked to cancer. If you fly a few times a year, the results of a new study by two of us may elicit exactly that feeling; pilots and flight attendants die of radiation-related cancers at higher rates than workers in over 500 occupations that we studied. So should you rethink your travel plans? We aren’t, and we don’t think you should, either. Understanding why can teach us a lot about how to read health headlines like this one.Commercial jets cruise at altitudes above 30,000 feet, where the atmosphere is thin, allowing for higher speeds and engine efficiency. But the thinner atmosphere offers less shielding from cosmic radiation (in the form of high-energy particles that stream in from the sun and from deep space) than we enjoy closer to sea level. Spending hundreds of hours among the clouds each year, air crew absorb more radiation, on average, than workers in any other job in the U.S.—including those generating nuclear power and our colleagues who work with radiation for medical purposes. This type of ionizing radiation, in sufficient doses, can damage DNA and give rise to cancer. What has ...