Originally Posted by
tdracer
But the pilots would always disappear about 10 hours before the planned pre-flight briefing (which typically started about two hours before we boarded the aircraft so ~12 hours bottle to throttle).
Just to clarify, the required period after consuming alcohol ends these days when you report for duty, not when you block out or take off. Also the point at which you are considered to be on duty has been interpreted to be arrival at the airport in recent cases that I am aware of. However, you might get lucky with an international court like the American Airlines pilot in Manchester who claimed he was showing up at the airport drunk in uniform to tell the captain that he was unfit to fly.
After the 1990 Fargo alcohol incident Northwest had a policy where you could turn yourself in to the HIMS program and not be disciplined up until the preflight checklist was read. Nowadays if you report for work drunk as a crewmember you don't have to make it to the plane to be in violation of alcohol rules. I'll be the first to agree that this seems to play out a little differently in every case in different jurisdictions.