Originally Posted by
Deadstick126
I would never have even one sip of alcohol in the 12 hours preceding a flight. Limits are ridiculous when it should be zero tolerance.
What does zero tolerance mean? Alcohol occurs in the body without any consumption so if the limit was set to zero no one would fly at all.
The current driving limit of 80 mg/l was set after research that showed that this was at this point that performance started to degrade significantly, interestingly performance increased slightly at lower levels. The exact level is of course arguable, different studies give slightly different results, when is a change significant etc but setting the limit to a quarter of this level is rightly very cautious. Setting it significantly lower would mean that pilots who had consumed no alchol within that last several days could exceed the limit which is surely not desireable.
What evidence is there that setting a limit lower than currently would improve safety?