Practical Approach for Radiological Protection in Aviation-How Can We Assess the Cosmic Radiation Exposures of Flying Individuals?

IAEA has pointed out the need of assessment of aviation doses received by aircraft crew as a general safety requirement. Also, ICRP recently recommended that frequent flyers as members of the public should know self-assessment individual doses and, as appropriate, adjust their flight rosters. However, it is hard for some of the flyers to get their accurate aviation doses through repeated calculations using the detailed information of flight profiles. The method for individual monitoring should be easy to perform, requiring no professional skills and elaborative work. This task could be achieved by either or mixture of two approaches by using 1) an easy-to-handle program for route dose calculation and 2) a portable electronic dosimeter having long operational time. In this report, possible practical approaches for aviation dose monitoring are discussed and some promising results related to a dosimeter-based approach are presented.