Not a duplicate, but this isn’t the first time. I posted this thread after observing the same thing on a flight a few years ago. The crew ended up getting several of us to help those who’d passed out.
I got some pretty good answers, but I still wonder what happened that night. None of the theories seemed to really fit.
By what? Is there a chemical agent known to cause lightheadedness in ~2% of the people who inhale it and leave even them with no need for medical treatment?
Sounds like someone smelled something odd. One or more people felt “light-headed”. Others saw them and, concluding something was going on, began experiencing symptoms themselves.
Two possibilities in my non-expert opinion: 1) there actually was some chemical toxin that made people sick. Or 2) the considerably more likely explanation of mass hysteria.
The OP’s link says, “(o)ne of the crew said something about oven cleaner reacting badly”. It also contains a link to a story about the earlier AA flight which experienced a similar episode. That story mentions the possibility of “a loss of equilibrium” related to a loss of air pressure in the cabin.
Until more is known, with more certainty, I would say it sounds like two incidents unrelated, except for the fact that they occurred on the same airline.
Zika virus typically produces flu-like symptoms of varying severity. The danger for babies comes if a pregnant woman comes down with the virus while she is pregnant, which apparently (notice that this connection has not yet been conclusively proven) can cause one or more kinds of birth defects.
If the dizziness were associated with a virus like this, the people suffering from it would still feel sick after the dizziness passed, it wouldn’t be just a momentary phenomenon.
F.U. Shakespeare seems to be the voice of reason in this thread. Oven cleaner fumes and temporary lack of oxygen are perfectly reasonable explanations for these occurrences.
As for an attack, I can say that by offering that as an explanation, the terrorists have won.