About FlightRadiation

We are an independent research team building accessible cosmic-radiation dose reports for passengers and non-occupational frequent fliers. We are not the FAA, not the ICRP, and not a medical practice. The model we use, however, is the same one used by aircrew dosimetry programs worldwide.

Who built this

FlightRadiation is a small, independent editorial and analytics project. The team includes contributors with backgrounds in physics, aviation, and technical writing. We are not licensed physicians, radiation-protection officers, or aviation-safety regulators. Nothing on this site is medical advice or a substitute for an occupational-medicine review.

Our work draws entirely on publicly available primary sources: FAA Civil Aerospace Medical Institute (CAMI) publications, ICRP recommendations, NCRP reports, the published CARI-series papers by Friedberg and Copeland, and NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center data. We add nothing proprietary to the underlying physics; we add interpretation, route-by-route dose attribution, and reader-friendly presentation.

Why this site exists

The FAA publishes a public CARI-7A web tool that anyone can use to compute the dose from a single flight. That tool is excellent — but it computes one segment at a time, uses defaults a layperson wouldn't recognise, and outputs a single number with no narrative or context. We saw three gaps that frequent fliers and crew partners kept asking about:

• Annualisation. Most fliers have a flight log, not a single segment. Aggregating an entire year and comparing it to ICRP-103 limits requires re-running CARI per segment, weighting by passenger profile, and presenting it against the right reference levels.
• Polar-route attribution. The contribution of polar crossings to total dose is the single biggest reducible exposure for transatlantic and transpolar fliers. The free CARI tool doesn't surface this.
• ICRP-103 context. Numbers in millisieverts mean nothing in isolation. Our report places annual dose against the four reference levels that matter: ICRP-103 public limit (1 mSv/yr), FAA aircrew action level (6 mSv/yr), occupational five-year averaged limit (20 mSv/yr), and the gestational limit (1 mSv across pregnancy).

How we make money

One thing, one price: a $15 PDF report. No subscription, no upsell, no ad tracking, no email list sale. The fee covers the compute time of running CARI-7 per segment for your flight log, the dosimetry rendering, and the cost of the small editorial team that maintains the methodology and source library. We do not accept sponsorship from airlines, aircraft manufacturers, or any party with a stake in the dose numbers we report.

Editorial standards — what we will claim

• Every numeric dose value in a published report is traceable to a specific model run (CARI-7 or CARI-7A) with named inputs (origin, destination, cruise FL, departure date, heliocentric potential).
• Every reference threshold we cite is named with its source publication (e.g. ICRP-103 §5.6.2, FAA AC 120-61B Table 1).
• Every guide article on this site lists its primary sources at the bottom and dates the last review.
• When a number is an estimate or model output rather than a measurement, we say so.

What we will not claim

• We do not give medical advice. We will never tell a reader "do not fly" or "this dose is dangerous." We will tell them what the number is and which licensed professional (radiation oncologist, occupational-medicine physician, obstetrician) is qualified to advise on individual risk.
• We do not certify aircrew dose for regulatory purposes. Carriers operate their own dosimetry programs under FAA AC 120-61B. Our reports are educational and individual; they are not a substitute for an employer's program.
• We do not endorse, and are not endorsed by, the FAA, ICRP, NCRP, ACOG, NOAA, or any other agency named on this site.
• We do not model dose from in-flight solar particle events unless the user supplies dates that overlap a logged SPE — and even then, the uncertainty is large and we will say so on the report.

What this site doesn't cover

• Spaceflight dose. Civil aviation ceiling is below 51,000 ft for almost all aircraft and almost all routes. Suborbital and orbital dose calculations are a different physics problem and require different codes (e.g. HZETRN).
• Military aviation. High-altitude, sustained-supersonic, and combat-profile flying is outside the validated input space of CARI-7 for civil routes.
• Airport scanner dose. Backscatter-X-ray and millimetre-wave scanners deliver doses that are biologically trivial compared to flight dose and are covered well by other sources (e.g. ANSI/HPS N43.17).
• Cabin air quality, ozone exposure, jet-lag chronobiology. Real concerns, real literature, different topic.

Corrections

If you spot an error — a wrong threshold, a misattributed citation, an out-of-date publication number — please email [email protected]. We log every factual correction publicly on our corrections page, and we will issue a corrected report to any buyer affected by a model error.

Last reviewed 30 June 2026