Let's not automatically shoot the messenger, people, no matter how noble your intentions. They are there to provide basic facts, and they have done that. Naturally any mention of alcohol or cannabis, or even better, both at once, will cause the media to jump on it; what do you expect? A BAC of 0.08 at 5pm takes a bit of explaining. But everybody here has cottoned on to that incredible sentence...
The possibility that the pilot’s BAC reading resulted at least in part from post-mortem alcohol production could not be discounted.
That was news to me and to everybody I have spoken to in aviation about this report. Captain Marvellous apparently knows all about it, perhaps he can explain it to us. It will save me Googling it myself if he does it for us. I don't mean to sound as though I doubt it, it's just completely foreign to me and I'm happy to admit it.
I was working at Hammo when the preliminary report came out about six weeks ago and the alcohol and cannabis reference was the main talking point of the flying community up there at that time as it has the media's attention now. It would be unnatural for it not to.
The report as issued is one of those things which, while factually based, is going to leave a slur for all time on the pilot whatever the truth. I can only say that the general attitude up there at the time was not one of "Oh yeah, well it had to happen to him eventually." More so it was disbelief, and with good reason. This accident happened at the end of what was a pretty normal hard day for these guys; starting early, multiple short legs in hot sticky conditions, loading and unloading baggage all day.
As one pilot said to me, if anybody had consumed enough alcohol to be still reading .08 at the end of the day, he would have been absolutely reeking of it earlier. Even in the unlikely event that no passenger in the cramped confines of a PA32 reported him smelling of alcohol on a normal day, once news of the accident was released passengers would have been crawling out of the woodwork to get their faces on the news to tell their story. No such stories exist.
This alcohol thing doesn't add up and I hope for the sake of the dead pilot's reputation and the peace of mind of his passengers, the post-mortem alcohol production is addressed more clearly than just a footnote in the report. Let's hope that when it is, the media will be as keen to jump on it as they have been to jump on their earlier reports.
RIP Andy.