The vast majority of U.S. airline pilots are trustworthy people who do a commendable job of getting their passengers from point A to point B.
However, even a handful of pilots who act irresponsibly can pose a deadly hazard for hundreds of passengers. What steps are appropriate to identify such pilots?
We know they’re out there. There was the incident last month in which distracted pilots were out of radio contact for more than an hour and overshot their destination by 150 miles before returning to reality. This week, a U.S. pilot was arrested on an alcohol-related charge just before his aircraft took off from London’s Heathrow Airport.
According to a recent Associated Press story, he was the third U.S. pilot arrested in the last 13 months on alcohol-related charges. The Federal Aviation Administration reports that 13 pilots violated alcohol-related rules in 2008. That’s a small number compared with the number of pilots flying each day, but given the current level of enforcement, it raises suspicions about how many more pilots might be flouting alcohol consumption rules.
The FAA does background checks on pilots but has no procedure for verifying their blood-alcohol level before they enter the cockpit. The pilot arrested in London was turned in by a co-worker, but that probably is a rare occurrence. In one of the other recent arrests, passengers reported the pilot smelled of alcohol. After that incident, the president of the Southwest Airlines pilots union said that nervous fliers often accuse pilots of drinking, especially after highly publicized incidents, but that “99 percent of (the accusations) are completely unfounded.”
We have an answer for that. If pilots were routinely tested before entering the cockpit, airline passengers and employees would have no reason to be concerned. Fellow employees couldn’t use false accusations to unfairly sully a pilot’s reputation, and passengers wouldn’t have to wonder whether a pilot was impaired by alcohol.
Airline pilots have gotten quite a bit of negative publicity lately because of the misdeeds of just a few. That isn’t fair, but airline passengers are literally putting their lives in the hands of the people in the cockpit and they need to feel that their pilots warrant that trust. A more methodical check on pilots’ blood-alcohol levels would help restore that trust.
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