Your career radiation dose: how it adds up and why to keep a record

No single flight is a radiation concern, and no single year of flying is either. What crews carry is the total. A few millisieverts a year, repeated over a career of 25 or 35 years, adds up to a figure worth knowing, and in most of the world nobody else is keeping it for you. This article walks through how the dose builds, what a career comes to, what the rules require, and what a useful personal record contains.

How a year adds up

What you fly decides most of it. In its leaflet on aircrew exposure, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says the highest doses go to long-haul crews on polar routes and "can be up to 6 mSv in a year," while crews on short-haul and other long-haul flying get two to three times less. Worldwide, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation puts the average for aircrew at 2.7 mSv a year for 2010 to 2014, within an uncertainty range of 1.5 to 4.6 mSv (UNSCEAR 2020/2021, Annex D).

Three things move your own number from year to year.

Routes and latitude. The FAA's AC 120-61B puts the dose rate over the polar regions at about twice the rate over the geomagnetic equator at the same altitude. A bid that moves you from South America to the North Pacific can nearly double a year's dose with the same block hours.

Altitude and hours. Higher cruise levels mean less air overhead, and dose builds by the hour at cruise. Two crew members with the same hours can end the year a long way apart.

The Sun. Galactic cosmic radiation is strongest near solar minimum, when the Sun's magnetic field does the least to keep it out. Under LogAloft's model, New York to London gave about 41 µSv at the 2009 minimum and about 24 µSv in January 2026, near the current maximum. How much radiation do you get on a flight? shows the swing on 14 routes. A career spans two or three solar cycles, so the same line can deliver noticeably different doses ten years apart.

What a career comes to

Multiplying out is simple. The harder part is reading the result.

The risk column uses the coefficient of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). In Publication 103, the ICRP concludes that, "assuming a linear response at low doses, the combined detriment due to excess cancer and heritable effects remains unchanged at around 5% per Sv." At that rate, 180 mSv corresponds to about 0.9%, or roughly 1 in 110.

Three cautions belong next to those numbers.

1. They are estimates, not measurements. Nobody has measured harm directly at aircrew doses. The coefficient comes from groups who received much higher doses, scaled down on the assumption that risk is proportional to dose.
2. They are for protection planning. The same ICRP document gives the main uses of effective dose as "prospective dose assessment for planning and optimisation" and compliance with limits, and says it should not be used for "detailed specific retrospective investigations of individual exposure and risk." The table describes a population of crew members with that history. It is not a forecast for you.
3. Cosmic radiation is a particular kind of radiation. Much of the dose at altitude comes from neutrons and high-energy particles, spread fairly evenly through the body. Effective dose is designed so that doses of different kinds can be added in the same unit, but the risk per unit carries more uncertainty here than for medical X-rays.

What the studies of crews themselves show is a mixed picture. A pooled study of 93,771 crew members from 10 countries (Hammer and colleagues, 2014) found overall mortality "strongly reduced" in male cockpit crew and female cabin crew compared with the general population, with deaths from melanoma elevated among pilots. Pilots and the new cancer study looks at the 2026 US study that ranked crews high for radiation-linked cancer deaths, and at what it can and can't show.

What the rules require

In the European Union, Council Directive 2013/59/Euratom sets two thresholds for airlines in Article 35(3).

For workers covered by individual monitoring, Article 43 requires the dose record to be kept through the working life and "until they have or would have attained the age of 75 years, but in any case not less than 30 years after termination of the work involving exposure." Member states run national data systems for those records.

In the United States there is no equivalent. AC 120-61B recommends the ICRP's occupational limits (20 mSv a year averaged over five years, no more than 50 mSv in a single year) and supports airline programs that inform crew, but no regulation requires an airline to calculate, record or cap a crew member's dose. Many crews outside Europe are in the same position.

Why keep a record of your own

Even where the airline keeps one, a personal record is worth having.

Careers move. People change airlines and bases, get furloughed, or end up at a merged carrier. The dose figures an employer kept may stay behind when you leave, and in the US there may never have been any.

Health questions come later. A doctor working through a diagnosis twenty years from now may ask about occupational exposure. "About 3 mSv a year for 28 years, mostly North Atlantic" is a useful answer; "I flew a lot" is not. The same applies if a future study, claim or screening program asks for your history.

The estimates are good, but they're estimates. Airline figures come from calculation codes, not personal dosimeters, and different codes and weighting schemes give somewhat different answers. Keeping your own record lets you compare like with like and notice when a figure looks off.

Pregnancy and bidding need recent numbers. A crew member who declares a pregnancy, or who wants to lower her or his dose, needs month-by-month figures, not a yearly letter. Pregnancy and flying covers the limits that apply then.

What a useful record contains

A record does its job when someone else can understand it years later without you there to explain it. The essentials:

• Every flight, with its date, origin and destination, block or air time, and the cruise level if you have it.
• The dose for each flight, with the method that produced it (for example a CARI-7-based calculation) so a later reader knows what the numbers mean.
• Totals by month and by year, and a running career total.
• Notes on unusual events, such as a flight during a solar radiation storm, when the dose can be higher than any routine estimate shows. Solar storms and your flight explains why.
• Copies of anything official, such as dose letters or reports from your airline, kept with the rest.

Keep it in more than one place. A spreadsheet on a single laptop is a record until the laptop dies.

How LogAloft keeps it

LogAloft calculates the cosmic radiation dose of every flight in your logbook, using a model based on the FAA's CARI-7A, and you can import past logbooks to fill in earlier years. Reports → Radiation shows the record by month and by year, and its Career section gives your total so far, a year at your current pace and a projection to the year you expect to stop flying. The radiation record prints or saves as a PDF for a doctor or your files. How LogAloft works out your dose explains the method and its accuracy.

For how each flight's number in that record is worked out, see How LogAloft works out your radiation dose.

Sources

1. Cosmic radiation exposure of aircrew and space crew, IAEA
2. Evaluation of occupational exposure to ionizing radiation (UNSCEAR 2020/2021 Report, Annex D), UNSCEAR, 2022
3. AC 120-61B, In-Flight Radiation Exposure, FAA, November 21, 2014
4. ICRP Publication 103, The 2007 Recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (free extract), ICRP
5. Council Directive 2013/59/Euratom, Articles 35 and 43, EUR-Lex, December 5, 2013
6. Mortality from cancer and other causes in commercial airline crews: a joint analysis of cohorts from 10 countries (Hammer et al.), Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2014