Case to Examine Toll of Cabin Smoke on Flight Attendant

Flight attendant Carol Ann Coy spent 17 years serving American Airlines passengers as they jetted across the nation’s skies. Long shifts, cramped working quarters and odd hours were an accepted part of the job.

Lung cancer was not.

So when Coy, a nonsmoker throughout her working life, was diagnosed with the disease that ultimately killed her in 1991, she blamed years of smoke-filled airline cabins for her plight.

She filed a $95,000 workers’ compensation claim, becoming one of the first flight attendants to do so.

The claim was rejected, but Coy died at the age of 45 before her appeal could be heard. So her husband and young son became the first surviving family members to continue to pursue such a claim, legal experts say. The widower’s lawyer believes the appeal will be heard this year by the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board.

While a handful of earlier secondhand smoke claims have had mixed success, anti-smoking activists and their attorneys believe Coy’s case will be boosted by January’s report by the federal Environmental Protection Agency ranking secondhand tobacco smoke among potent Class A carcinogens that include benzene, asbestos and radon.

“People are just now beginning to understand the dangers of side-stream smoke,” said Coy’s attorney, Marvin Shapiro. “She didn’t survive to see it happen . . . and I don’t want to be melodramatic, but there’s some part of my gut that has to finish this battle off for her.”

Tobacco industry officials decline to comment on how the EPA ruling will affect secondhand smoke cases. However, they strongly disagree with the EPA’s conclusions.

“There are a number of scientists who have taken issue with the EPA and its report and so have we,” said Bill Wordham, a spokesman for the Tobacco Institute, a research organization underwritten by tobacco companies. “We believe that an objective review does not show an association between passive smoke and an increased risk of cancer to a nonsmoker.”

The driving force behind Coy’s case is her husband, to whom she had been married just over a year when she was found to have cancer. Michael Coy, 49, is only beginning to adjust to a life without Carol.

“We met on Oct. 4, 1986. She died on Oct. 4, 1991 and it’s been the hardest tragedy,” Coy said. “She wanted to live so much, to enjoy what we had and to raise our son.”

In addition to the workers’ compensation claim, Coy has joined a class-action lawsuit filed in Florida on behalf of thousands of flight attendants against the nation’s leading tobacco companies. That suit, which seeks millions of dollars in damages, was filed shortly after Carol Coy’s death.

A state court judge last year ruled that the suit could not continue as a class action, but attorneys in the case say the EPA’s new classification of secondhand smoke as a carcinogen should help them get that ruling overturned.

“This is the first civil case litigating this issue of passive smoke,” attorney Stanley Rosenblatt said. “It’s a crusade for me. . . . I never bought (the tobacco industry’s) arguments that smokers know and accept the risk of smoking, but here we’ve got even more totally innocent victims--a whole class of people repeatedly exposed to this toxic substance through no choice of their own.”

Coy’s fellow flight attendants applaud her husband’s willingness to continue the battle she died fighting.

“I’m sick to death of being assaulted, mutilated and violated by these drug addicts,” said flight attendant Patty Young, who has been lobbying to ban all in-flight smoking for two decades.

A 1989 ban on smoking during domestic flights, while a step in the right direction, does not protect cabin crews assigned to international flights, Young said. Nor does it ban smoking in crowded airline terminals, she said.

“I figure if this stuff is going into the air vents, it’s certainly going into me,” Young said.

Carol Coy figured out much the same thing, her husband said.

“Long before she was sick, every time she got in from a flight, the first thing she’d do was go in and take a shower to get rid of that awful smoke smell,” Coy said. “That was the one thing she hated about her job--all that smoke.”

The Coys, both of whom had believed they would remain single for life, met at a mutual friend’s wedding in 1986 and married within a year.

Although she was 42 at the time, Carol Coy looked younger, her husband said, eating all the right foods, exercising every day and enjoying the clean beach breezes that blew through the couple’s ocean-view condominium in Redondo Beach. The Coys decided she was not too old to have a baby.

“A year later we had our son, Christopher,” Michael Coy said as the 4-year-old played happily in the background. “Three months after that, they diagnosed the cancer.”

It started, her husband said, with a nagging cough after a brief bout of flu. Doctors found a dark spot on a chest X-ray and suggested she undergo a biopsy of what they believed to be a small, benign tumor.

During the biopsy, surgeons discovered that the growth was cancerous and removed half of her right lung to try to halt the spread. Their efforts failed.

Although Carol had been a light smoker in her early 20s--no more than a pack a week for one or two years, Michael Coy said--she had no doubt that the cancer stemmed from her years in the air.

Nevertheless, her initial claims for workers’ compensation benefits were rejected. Previously, only a handful of other employees had filed successful workers’ compensation claims in California for injuries they suffered from secondhand smoke. None were flight attendants. All either had been waiting tables or serving drinks in smoke-filled restaurants or bars, experts said.

With the EPA’s new report, Shapiro believes he will win.

“Under workers’ compensation law, I only have to prove that the side-stream smoke contributed to the hastening of her demise,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be the sole and exclusive cause . . . and I’m confident that we’ll be able to show within the realm of medical probability that the side-stream smoke contributed to Carol’s death.”

Coy said the relatively small monetary award he and his son stand to gain--$336 a week for just over five years--is not what has motivates him.

“It’s a matter of doing something for Carol,” he said. “She died just after they took smoking off domestic flights and she was so relieved to hear that they had done it. . . . I just know she’s sitting up there saying, ‘Get it off the international flights. Get it off of all of them.’ ”