Scandal of pilots who drink and fly: 38 test positive for drugs, alcohol

The number of commercial pilots who tested positive for drugs or alcohol last year raises concerns about safe air travel.

The problem of a drunken pilot was addressed in the 2012 film Flight, starring Denzel Washington. Picture: Paramount Pictures

Thirty-eight commercial airline pilots in America tested positive for drugs or alcohol last year, according to official figures that will raise concerns about the safety of international air travel.

Figures from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the government agency that regulates the American airlines industry, showed that in random screening tests in 2015 ten pilots were found to be over the legal alcohol limit for flying a plane.

They were among 119 airline personnel - a category that also includes mechanics, dispatchers, ground security workers and air traffic controllers - who were above the legal limit, which in the airline industry is a blood alcohol level of 0.04 per cent. The failed tests represented a tiny minority of the 12,480 random sobriety tests that pilots submitted to last year, but they led to demands for mandatory breathalyser tests for all pilots reporting for duty.

The problem was addressed in the 2012 film Flight in which Denzel Washington played “Whip” Whitaker, a drunken pilot who against all odds crash-lands his aircraft during an emergency, only to have his addiction exposed by crash investigators afterwards.

Peter Bartos, a retired military pilot who holds a commercial pilot’s licence, noted that drug use appeared to be rising among pilots.

“It is mind-boggling that on average one US pilot a month is caught trying to fly a passenger aircraft while over the legal alcohol limit for flying,” he told Fox News, which obtained the figures using a Freedom of Information request. “It also means that others aren’t caught, since it is not a mandatory test for all pilots on every flight.”

Mr Bartos added that “all pilots from the problem airlines should blow into a breathalyser/drug tester before every flight until this trend stops”.

One Alaska Airlines pilot allegedly flew a commercial flight from Alaska to Oregon and back while drunk. An American Airlines pilot was said to have failed two sobriety tests before a 7am flight out of Detroit.

Asked if there were any plans to make breathalyser tests universal, a spokesman for the FAA replied: “Our existing drug and alcohol testing and abatement programmes are robust. We have no plans to require sobriety tests.”

Such “bottle to throttle” incidents remain rare in the American airline industry, which is said to have one of the best safety records in the world.

Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the US National Transportation Safety Board, who is now a senior aviation consultant for O’Neill and Associates, said that alcohol addiction among pilots had been addressed by the unions and airlines. “There are programmes both on the union level and at the major airlines that pilots can voluntarily go into,” he said.

Many argue that colleagues and flight crew also stop drunken staff from piloting planes.

New technology may soon further limit the possibility of an inebriated pilot taking the controls. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is supervising a research programme into “alcohol-detection technologies” that would prevent vehicles from being driven when a driver’s blood alcohol concentration exceeds the legal limit of 0.08 per cent.

The Times