‘Fume-like odor’ causes hazmat response on Frontier Airlines flight

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A Frontier Airlines plane lands at Miami International Airport on June 16, 2021.

Crew members aboard a Frontier Airlines flight on Thursday reported feeling nauseous from “a fume-like odor,” prompting a hazmat team to meet the plane upon landing in San Antonio.

Flight 990 departed Denver at 10:50 a.m. when flight attendants started feeling sick and told the captain, according to a statement the airline sent to USA TODAY.

The odor was contained to the back of the aircraft and no passengers were affected, the airline said.

An emergency response team by the San Antonio Fire Department arrived to meet the plane when it landed at San Antonio International Airport at 1:50 p.m., ready to test for poisonous gas.

“Originally, we were called for a strange odor on a plane and people feeling bad, so we sent a whole lot of people — hazmat, rescue, airport rescue, all these things out there — but once the plane landed, we realized there was no odor,” San Antonio Fire Department Public Information Officer Joe Arrington told My San Antonio.

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Upon arrival, the SAFD hazmat team did not detect any smell and cleared the plane via air monitoring, Arrington told USA TODAY in a statement.

The airline said the four flight attendants affected were “evaluated by emergency medical personnel as a precaution,” but no one had to go to the hospital.

All passengers deplaned safely. Frontier said the aircraft is being evaluated by its maintenance team to determine the cause of the odor.

Should I worry about toxic fumes on a flight?

Toxic fume incidents on planes are possible but rare. Researchers have found such incidents to occur between 0.09 and 3.9 per every 1,000 flights. Advocates are pushing for stricter restrictions on aircraft cabin air quality and monitoring.

These incidents are typically caused by a design issue with the plane’s ventilation system – fresh air comes through the engines on nearly all aircraft without the use of filters. Toxic fumes from other parts of the plane, like an oil leak in the engine, get caught in an aircraft’s ventilation system and sucked into the main cabin. If this is happening, people will probably notice a bad smell.