Originally Posted by
B2N2
You don’t know this and have no evidence for this.
Apart from the (complete?) lack of alcohol-induced incidents and accidents over many many years and hundreds of millions of flight hours plus a lot of investigations and testing? If this was similar to EROPS certification, it would have passed with flying colours a long time ago?
An altitude deviation, a misunderstood clearance early on in the flight?
There’s no testing required for these potentially high risk but eventually non consequential events.
And why should there be? From reports and observation, these occur in a random fashion during normal operations. It’s things like noisy channels, confirmation bias, authority gradient, improper readbacks, non-adherence to SOPs, etc. None of these need any level of intoxication to present themselves. Does a deep or short landing imply that the pilot has been on the sauce during the approach? To kind of answer that, for motor skills to be that degraded would make it rather obvious to others that the pilot in question was half-cut a long time before?
So we’ll never know how many of these events are caused by fatigue, self medicating or while even slightly intoxicated.
Yes, but as we’ll never know we can’t always attribute them to a particular factor. Is it the breakfast cereal, toilet paper or even Aliens? We do know from post-analysis when pilots are likely to have been suffering from fatigue after an accident, as we know their duty periods, actions and communications, and if they're still alive, how well they were rested and what they were feeling like in retrospect. And whether they’d dropped by the pub shortly before report.
Again, self reporting and self grounding is something different then getting caught and playing the compliant victim.
Relevant to this thread but not to the question of risk. From personal experience, people who have a serious enough problem to drink regardless of whether they are going flying, in full knowledge that it is a stupid (and criminal) thing to do, are what some might call “functional alcoholics” and don’t seem to be affected by a particular quantity of alcohol to the same degree as those who are moderate or abstain. Doesn’t make it right but this scenario is played out continually in all walks of life - it would be much better if everybody with this kind of problem went straight for professional help instead of the aeroplane but that’s not how it works most of the time, unfortunately.
TL;DR Flying + Alcohol = Bad, but not half as bad or common as other factors that are much more likely to lead to unpleasantness but don’t make the news...