Deadly Soviet nerve gas Novichok explained after new ‘10/10’ Netflix film shows how dangerous it is
Carry-on has shot up to the number one film spot on Netflix
Netflix has a new number one film and fans can’t get enough of the Christmas themed action thriller starring Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman.
Released to the streaming giant on Friday (13 December), it stars Egerton of Kingsman fame as Ethan Kopek, a TSA officer at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) working a gruelling Christmas Eve shift before enjoying festivities with his pregnant girlfriend.
That is until Hollywood heavyweight Bateman – known for countless roles including in Ozark, Arrested Development, and Horrible Bosses – causes a whole world of problems as a nameless character known only as ‘the Traveler’ in the credits.
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The film – spoiler warning from here on in – focuses on the Traveler demanding multiple things from Kopek, threatening to kill his girlfriend if he doesn’t follow his high stake demands.
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It sees Kopek, who is checking bags at airport security, allow a carry-on suitcase carrying deadly nerve agent Novichok to pass by without any warning.
The end result? Kill an entire plane of passengers, including a Washington DC Congresswoman.
With the case finding its way on to the plane, Kopek boards it via the luggage hatch where he tries to disarm the bomb – only to be thwarted by the Traveler.
Taron Egerton as Ethan Kopek when tasked with disarming the Novichok bomb (Netflix)
The two of them come to blows, with Kopek shot by the Traveler.
Thankfully, though, Kopek gets the upper hand, locking him in an airtight freezer unit in the cargo hold – alongside the Novichok, which is released and kills him.
Labelled a hit with fans, many have taken to social media to label it a ’10/10′ film that is like a ‘modern day Die Hard’.
A very real Novichok threat
Created by the Soviet Union and Russia between the years of 1971 and 1993, Novichok – meaning ‘newcomer’ in English – is a group of nerve agents that cause immense farm to organic matter.
Officially labelled chemical weapons, they are claimed to be the deadliest ever nerve agent that humanity has create.
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The purpose of its creation was to be undetectable by NATO during the 1970s and 1980s and to overcome chemical protective uniform if encountered by NATO personnel.
Since 1997, it has been banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997; something Russia has signed and ratified.
The Salisbury Poisonings saw one person die and four more hospitalised (Jack Taylor/Getty Images)
Is there a Novichok antidote?
While Carry-on says there is no antidote for Novichok, it’s not quite true.
In 2018, Sergei Skripal – a former Russian military officer who became a British informant – was poisoned with Novichok alongside his daughter, Yulia, in an incident that is known as the Salisbury Poisonings. Police officer Nick Bailey was also poisoned after responding to the incident and coming in to contact with the Skripals.
Three months later, two British nationals in Amesbury – seven miles north of Salisbury – became seriously ill after coming in to contact with the nerve agent after finding a perfume bottle containing Novichok – with enough dose inside it to kill thousands of people.
One of the two, Dawn Sturgess, sprayed it on her wrist. She fell in within 15 minutes and died just over a week later. The other victim, Charlie Rowley, survived.
A Novichok attack on British soil (Jack Taylor/Getty Images)
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All four victims other than Sturgess survived, with it nearly killing Skripal and his daughter. Yulia was in a come for 20 days and underwent treatment described by her as ‘invasive, painful and depressing’.
“Our recovery has been slow and extremely painful,” she said, as per the BBC.
The British government identified two Russian nationals, known as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, as the men behind the attack.
It later came out these were aliases for two Russian intelligence officers, real names Alexander Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga.
According to the BBC, the trio were charged with conspiracy to murder, three counts of attempted murder, two counts of grievious bodily harm with intent, and one count of use or possession of a chemical weapon.
Novichok in Carry-on (Netflix)
What is the treatment for Novichok?
Treatment for Novichok starts with high doses of a drug known as atropine.
Dr Peter Chai, of the Division of Medical Toxicology in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said that people poisoned with Novichok and other nerve agents die due to secretions – vomiting, diarrhoea and urinary incontinence that all happen at the same time.
Atropine is a drug that counteracts these effects and also increases your heart rate. This slows how quickly the Novichok goes through your system.
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After buying yourself some time, the antidote for Novichok is administered; a nitrogen-containing chemical compound known as an oxime, CNN reports.
This works by stopping the Novichok from taking ahold of your nervous system and hindering it. How successful this works, though, depends on how the nerve gas is ingested and how much of it goes in to your system.
Knowing all this, in terms of Carry-on, it seems like should that weaponised Novichok have been detonated at 30,000 feet the outcome would have been rather grim for anyone involved.
Delta Pilot Arrested Just Before Takeoff For Failing Breathalyzer—Every Passenger Now Owed $705 Cash
Every Delta passenger onboard Delta flight 205 from Stockholm to New York JFK today is entitled to $705 (600 euros) in cash compensation, after one of the pilots was arrested this morning for failing a breathalyzer test as the plane was “about to take off” and the flight was cancelled.
A police operation took place at Arlanda Airport on Tuesday morning. At 09.15, a pilot was arrested by the police during a check on board an aircraft.
…According to the police, the plane was about to take off from Arlanda when the arrest took place. …According to Aftonbladet, it is a female pilot from the United States.
With 198 seats onboard, that’s $139,590 that Delta is obligated to pay out to passengers under European Union rule EU261, given the length of delayed arrival and distance of the flight. And that doesn’t include the cost of lodging and meals, and disruption to follow-on flights that would have been operated by the aircraft.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency mandates random alcohol testing for flight and cabin crew operating out of EU member states under regulation 2018/1042.
In the fall, two Delta flight attendants working the same Amsterdam departure were arrested after failing a breathalyzer.
Pilot drinking, though, is a challenge all airlines (and regulators) have to grapple with. There was a Delta flight cancelled when the captain was arrested for intoxication in 2023. This happens infrequently, but isn’t unheard of. Earlier this year a Southwest pilot was arrested smelling of booze at security before a flight.
Last year, a Japan Airlines pilot had a big night out in Dallas where he drank with other crewmembers starting around 6 p.m., continued drinking in the hotel lounge, and later in his room. Layover hotel guests were complaining about noise in his room, and police were called at 2 a.m.
In 2019 United pilots flying out of Glasgow to Newark were arrested on intoxication charges and a fully-boarded Delta flight from Minneapolis was cancelled due to an intoxicated pilot. Of course United flight from London was also once delayed to remove a drunk air marshal.
In the U.S., commercial airline pilots have to go at least 8 hours from their last drink prior to flying (“8 hours bottle-to-throttle”) and their blood alcohol limit is .04. A JetBlue pilot was arrested in 2022 for blowing a .17. The only thing you’re prepared to drive at .17 is the porcelain bus. JetBlue’s priority of course is safety. This pilot’s priority may have been getting so tanked he thought he was Gary Busey trying to explain who really killed Bruce Lee.
Once, though, a pilot drank 17 rum and cokes before actually flying from Fargo to Minneapolis (he “fell on the floor before leaving the bar”) while “two other crew members shared seven pitchers of beer.”
Drinking by pilots is a very sensitive subject. American Airlines was even forced to apologize when their outsource inflight magazine depicted pilots mixing cocktails.
Air travel can be a difficult career and drinking and other substance problems get hidden. Pilots with substance abuse problems are often wary of speaking up and seeking help, for fear of being sidelined, despite programs designed to encourage them to do so.
Pilots hide not just alcohol abuse but mental health conditions and that points to a fundamental conundrum: you want pilots to be open and seek help in order to promote safety, but once they’re open they’re a clearly identified risk and get removed from the cockpit. So the consequences of being open discourage that openness. Or at least that’s the fear many pilots have, not trusting the commitments that are in place to help rather than punish.
First Class, Low Class, No Class: The Passenger Hall of Shame
June 20, 2016
I’M OLD ENOUGH to remember when people dressed up to fly. I remember my dad putting on a tie before we left for the airport. And that was on a trip to Florida, of all places, as recently as the early 1980s.
One of the reasons that people once took flying so seriously is that so few of them had the means to partake in it. Not all that long ago, only a fraction of the population could afford to fly on a regular basis. When I was in junior high, in the late ’70s, maybe a third of my classmates had ever been in an airplane. Even into high school I frequently met other kids who’d never flown. Flying today is far cheaper than it used to be. As a result, almost everybody does it.
And as the demographics have changed, so have the levels of behavior. This we’d expect. With nearly four million people flying every day of the week, across every strata of culture and class, standards of decorum were bound to fall. That’s fine, and I don’t mean to sound snobbish. Maintaining simple dignity doesn’t require anything too formal. I have no problem, for example, with people wearing shorts and sandals onto a plane.
But there comes a point, and what I do have a problem with is when otherwise reasonable protocols of civility, manners and courtesy cease to apply. What is it? Is it the stress? Is it the contempt people harbor for the airlines? Whatever the causes, flying has a way of bringing out the worst in people.
I’ve never been privy to a full-blown “air rage” incident, but I’ve witnessed countless instances of shameful behavior: passengers cursing at airline staff; stealing from the liquor carts; leaving diapers in seat pockets; etc. It tends to be small-scale stuff — rudeness and a lack of elementary courtesy — rather than anything violent or overtly hostile, but that doesn’t excuse it. Why, for example, do so many airline passengers find it acceptable to throw garbage and food all over the cabin floor, then mash it into the carpeting with their feet? You don’t do this in a restaurant. Why is it okay on an airplane?
Here’s some of what I’ve seen just in the last few months…
I am at the airport in Dubai one early morning, waiting to catch an Emirates flight to Boston. I’m sitting in the boarding lounge when I hear a strange noise coming from behind me. Snip, snip snip, click, click, click.
I turn around, and what do I see? The guy directly behind me — a young guy in his twenties — is sitting cross-legged in his chair. Both of this feet are naked, and he is clipping his toenails. With every snip and click he splits away another crescent of nail, which he drops into a growing pile next to his left knee.
Would you take off your socks and start clipping your toenails in a movie theater? In the waiting room at your dentist? Most people would feel uneasy doing it in the woods, never mind at an airport boarding lounge in front of three-hundred people. And while I don’t want to watch, I feel that I have to. Because I need to know what he’s going to do with that big, disgusting pile of trimmings once our flight begins to board. Is he going to collect them up and carry them to the trash? Or will he brush them to the floor?
What do you think he does?
On another occasion I am at Kennedy Airport, in terminal four. A woman and her young daughter are sitting on a bench-seat along the edge of the corridor. The daughter is four, maybe five years old, and she’s holding a tall plastic cup brimming with round, colored candies. They’re marble-shaped candies, possibly peanut M&Ms. All at once, with no warning, the girl flings the cup onto the floor. It’s an impressive spectacle, I have to say, as hundreds of tiny orbs go clattering across the carpet, coming to rest in a great fan of color. People turn and stare.
And what does the woman do? She stands up, takes the girl by the hand, and the two of them walk silently away, leaving the entire mess — even the plastic cup — sitting there for some unfortunate janitorial worker to sweep up.
Meanwhile, people are kicked off planes all the time for acting, and even dressing, obnoxiously. In Boston recently, jetBlue denied boarding to a young woman because they felt her shorts were too revealing. Apparently, though, a t-shirt emblazoned with the words FUCK LOVE in huge block letters is within the boundaries of decency?
I’m not a prude. Nonetheless I’m dying to understand when and how this sort of thing become acceptable. And I’m imagining this same attire in a different context: In the bleachers at a baseball game, for instance. Would that be okay? Would the guy be asked to leave? Wouldn’t he be harassed by parents who’d brought their kids along? There are plenty of little kids at airports, so why is it different? And which is more troubling, the fact that he’s being accommodated, or the fact that somebody rude enough to put on a shirt like that exists in the first place?
Next we have Ms. Stinkytoes, luxuriating in her Emirates first class suite. She shows us that boorishness these days isn’t merely for the louts in steerage. Are these the same people who buy elephant ivory and rhinoceros horns? And the privacy of her suite is no excuse (couldn’t she at least have closed the doors?). Maybe I’m overreacting to this one, but how is this any more appropriate that resting one’s bare and splayed toes on a restaurant table? This is still, for all intents and purposes, a public place, and somebody else is going to be occupying that cubicle a few hours from now. And for crying out loud, they give you socks and slippers!
