Poisonous gas attack on plane. Effective?

kingdragonfly: I heard that Sydney terrorist were contemplating or building a device with poisonous gas for use on a plane.

While this may kill all the passengers (including the terrorist), it would be ineffective on the crew, right?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3910048/Toxic-cabin-fumes-POISON-plane-passengers-oxygen-masks-no-protection-warns-BA-s-flight-safety-chief.html

"The head of in-flight safety for British Airways has admitted that passengers can be 'incapacitated' by toxic fumes on planes.

Mark Mannering-Smith reportedly wrote on an internal online forum that cabin fumes can be toxic and therefore hurt crew and travellers.

His comments which were posted on the internet have since been deleted, but were saved by BA staff, reports The Sun on Sunday.

Mr Mannering-Smith wrote staff members can wear protective gear called smoke hoods, which are similar to gas masks, 'regardless of customer perception'.

Customers on board the flight will not have the same protection by using the oxygen masks which drop down during an emergency, according to the paper.

A senior BA source told the newspaper's Stephen Moyes: 'Oxygen comes from tanks in the hold.

'But the masks they use are designed to allow cabin air in so they do not provide protection from fumes.'"

The Pilots have oxygen systems that enable them to breath 100% bottle oxygen with hours of oxygen supply, which enables them to function at a high level in a depressurised/fume/smoke filled cabin and could theoretically survive a gas attack if they were to don the masks before the gas gets to them. But think about when you accidentally catch a wiff of oven cleaner and multiply it by 1,000. One breath could be all it takes.

The cabin crew have oxygen masks similar to passengers which supplement cabin air with addition oxygen. Cabin crew do have smoke hoods which are designed to proved a few minutes of smoke and fume protection but most designs do not exclude 100% of cabin air.

Passenger masks provide 7 minutes supplementary oxygen - they mix with cabin air are designed to provide sufficient oxygen in a high altitude depressurisation to keep passengers alive & free from brain damage while the aircraft descends to an altitude at which humans can breath properly. Oxygen n flows through that little hose not much faster than fish tank bubbler and the flow is barely perceptible - it certainly doesn't rush out. They are not designed to enable passengers to breath in a smoke/fume/gas filled environment. The masks are deployed automatically if the cabin altitude rises beyond 14,000 feet (normal cabin altitude is around 7-8,000 feet depending on model of aircraft), or if the pilot manually deploys them.

The cabin air is completely replaced every 3 to 4 minutes so such a gas would quickly be purged from the aircraft. The problem is that if the crew have not been trained for a gas attack they may fail to identity the problem and don their emergency gear in time. If the flight crew were do correctly diagnose a gas attack they could take corrective action to help speed up purging of the gas out of the aircraft such as manually depressurising the aircraft to near instantly dump 1/2 the cabin air (and gas) overboard, or select full hot cabin temperature which increases the volume of air flowing into the cabin on bleed air feed air-con systems. I won't speculate on how a terrorist could optimise such an attack.

kingdragonfly

tripper1000