February 3, 1975. A Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 flies from Tokyo to Paris via Anchorage. 344 passengers, scheduled flight.
After Anchorage, breakfast was served. Ham and omelettes were served in the forward section of the cabin. Standard in-flight fare, nothing out of the ordinary.
An hour later, hell began.
One feels sick, then another, then ten. Twenty minutes later, there are lines for the restrooms in the aisles, people are vomiting, some are cramping up right in their seats, and flight attendants are rushing around with bags. There are more than ten restrooms on the 747—they weren’t enough.
We landed in Copenhagen, and 142 people were taken away by ambulance. A total of 196 out of 344 people on board fell ill. That’s more than half the plane.
The largest food poisoning in aviation history.
The pilots felt great, though. They were just lucky.
A cook, a bandage, and 14 hours without a refrigerator
We sorted it out quickly. The omelets were being prepared at a catering service in Anchorage. One of the cooks was slicing ham with purulent sores on his hands. He covered them with a bandage and went back to work.
Staphylococcus aureus entered the ham from the wounds. The finished omelets were then left at room temperature for 14 hours, then refrigerated at 10 degrees Celsius. The bacteria multiplied and produced a toxin. Staphylococcus aureus toxin is heat-stable and cannot be killed by heating.
This chef made 220 servings. 86% of those who ate his omelettes became ill.
The pilots’ internal clocks were set to Alaska time, and when breakfast was being served to the passengers, the pilots were craving dinner. They ordered steaks. They simply weren’t in the mood for an omelet, which saved them.
There was no “eat different foods” rule back then. It was pure luck.
JAL catering manager Kenji Kuwabara, 52, committed suicide after learning what had happened.
Where did the rule come from?
The investigation was led by Alaskan epidemiologist Mackie Eisenberg. He later published an article in The Lancet and proposed a simple solution: have the captain and co-pilot eat different meals. If one is poisoned, the other is healthy and can land the plane.
Japan Air Lines was the first to implement it, and others followed suit.
The funny thing is, the FAA, the American aviation regulator, still hasn’t made this a mandatory requirement. Formally, it’s an internal airline policy. But since 1975, almost everyone has adopted it.
Pudding over the Atlantic
Seven years later, exactly what they feared happened.
August 1982, flight from Boston to Lisbon. Ten people on the crew. Eight of them ate tapioca pudding—including the captain, co-pilot, and flight engineer. In other words, everyone who controls the plane.
A few hours later, all eight are lying down. Vomiting, cramping, unable to work.
Who’s at the controls? The co-pilot, who simply didn’t want dessert.
Lucky again.
How it works in practice
A separate menu—crew meals—is loaded onto the plane for the crew. Several options. The captain takes one, I take another. Sometimes the captain gets a first-class meal, the co-pilot a business-class one. There’s an unspoken rule: a good captain lets the co-pilot choose first.
This doesn’t apply to flight attendants—there are a lot of them, and if one falls out, the others will pick it up. With us, the math is different: there are two of us.
Many guys don’t touch the on-board food at all. They take a container from home. They cook it themselves, you know what’s inside, no surprises. I do the same when I can.
Sushi, raw fish, and oysters—it’s best to avoid them before a flight. Shellfish poisoning sets in after 4-6 hours. If you’re at flight altitude and the runway is half an hour away—well, you know what I mean.
“Airplane!”
By the way, do you remember the 1980 comedy “Airplane!”?
There, both pilots and half the cabin are poisoned by fish, and the plane is landed by a guy with shaking hands.
So, the film came out two years before the pudding incident. The screenwriters were parodying the old 1957 film “Zero Hour!”, which also featured pilots who were incapacitated by food. Hollywood twice played up this plot as absurd. And it actually happened twice.
All in all
Aviation is full of such things. Simple rules that can be explained in half a minute, and each one has a specific story behind it.
I write about aviation in the Telegram channel “Pilot’s Everyday Life” —how everything works from the inside, what happens in the cockpit, and why there are no arbitrary rules in aviation. There are already analyses of TCAS, windows, and many other things that didn’t fit here.
