When passengers drink all the booze onboard that deserves congratulations.
In 1977 Southwest Airlines even became the largest liquor distributor in the State of Texas after adopting a two-tier fare structure (more expensive fares came with a takeaway bottle) to combat competition which was undercutting the carrier’s previous pricing as part of the Civil Aeronautics Board’s pre-deregulation ‘experimentation with price competition’.
When pilots drink, though, that’s serious. Serious enough that when the American Airlines had a photo of two bartenders dressed as pilots in their inflight magazine they had to apologize for the poor judgment that showed.
It’s happened at Alaska Airlines and at United. And at Air India. And at British Airways. We’ve even seen a pilot blow a .24 in the cockpit.
Sure, when an American pilot was arrested a reader asked whether that meant the airline was back to serving pre-departure beverages and I laughed. But it’s serious. Even seeing alcohol in the cockpit is serious.
@TheSun jet2 landed in birmingham must have been a bad flight if pilot needed stella!! pic.twitter.com/ZziGCuX91w
— jon edwards (@JonedwarJon) September 20, 2017
A former British Airways pilot offered a novel, though unsuccessful defense after failing a sobriety test prior to flight.
- He claimed to have had just one vodka and coke over nine hours prior to departure.
- There’s both a time and a blood alcohol content rule for pilots.
- He was way over on blood alcohol,
[A] breath test was carried out and he was found to have 52mg of alcohol in his breath – the legal limit is 9mg for a pilot.
The court heard a blood sample was subsequently taken and found it have 86mg in 100ml of blood – the drink drive limit is 80mg but the legal limit for a pilot is just 20mg.
- However since he promises he had been more than 8 hours ‘bottle to throttle’ he shouldn’t be punished.
It’s not an either-or standard. It’s both. And even if you believe he hadn’t had more than one drink and that it had been over 9 hours despite a blood alcohol content that wouldn’t allow him to drive a car let alone fly a plane, the blood alcohol content alone is enough.
The one drink claim reminds me of what George Burns once said, “Actually, it only takes one drink to get me loaded. Trouble is, I can’t remember if it’s the thirteenth or fourteenth.”
Seriously though a real challenge is that pilots with an alcohol problem may be 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 any commitments to help rather than punish.
(HT: Brendan Dorsey)
.08, I believe you mean. At .8, he’d be dead.
This stuff is so bad they make sitcom tv shows about it…
We really, really need a better way to deal with addiction and mental health. When you have a financial incentive to hide these problems from your employer, the rational choice becomes to hide these problems and avoid seeking treatment. A drunk pilot is no more as funny as an opioid addict in need of help. Our country needs to treat mental health and addiction as seriously we treat any physiological disease.
Can they not install an interlock device like they use in cars?
Pretty sure I’d lose my job if I showed up drunk…enough of of this over-entitled pilot situation, can the guy.
A pilot should be able to discuss both mental and addiction problems with a therapist. Everyone has a rough patch or so and they should be able to get counseling. However, in today’s world, you cannot assume privacy for the following reasons:
(1) Psychologists, psychiatrists, and other such counseling persons (“PPC” have a legal “duty to protect” that varies from state to state.
(2) If a mixed up teenager complaining about parents, PPCs are required to report a wide variety of things to child services. Many kids go into adulthood not trusting therapists because they have been burned by that.
(3) Right now, there is a big move to force PPC to report all patients to the federal government to monitor their 2nd amendment rights.
(4) Any treatment that was paid for by insurance goes into insurance databases and government datebases. Even if they keep them private, data collection agencies could find out ways to unmask the information. In fact, a 4/5/18 CNBC article by Christina Farr indicated that Facebook was in talks with top hospitals and other medical groups to share data. It was supposed to be anonymous, but Facebook has figured out a way to unmask them.
(5) If you apply for a job, I am sure they can get psychiatric information on you. In my case, of course, there are no such records since I have never gone to a PPC.
(6) If federal prosecutor wants to grab your psychiatric records, I am sure they can get them.
(7) Yale psychology professor Bandy Lee.
(8) Just imagining. Doctor, I am having this horrible dream. What dream son. “Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!…40 years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes!…The dead rising from the grave!…Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!” [Yea, Ghostbusters stuff.] Next thing, child services is in action, added to the Crazy person list, cannot go within 100 yards from a school, and they come to take my Chinese cleaver (great knife) since I do not have any guns.
I think we should make psychiatric records 100% private. No exceptions. Real privacy. Maybe they could head off some of the mental health issues.
@ben: in europe, blood alcohol is measured per mil (thousandth), not per cent (hundredth) like in n. america. therefore, 0.8 is correct. that is equal to 0.08 percent.