ANY alcohol impirs[sic] ability
Now from a scientific standpoint thats plainly a preposterous claim. What about 0.000000000001% blood alcohol? If you want a reasoned debate on this subject you can't start bandying around Daily Mail style claims like that. Alcohol, in
sufficent blood concentrations, will impair ability. The goal is to remove alcohol impairment fom the flight deck. On those two points I think we agree. The question is 'What is a sufficient blood alcohol concentration?', and the answer is not widely known because the authorities are not particularly interested in the answer.
I am pleased that you can win driving tests and not in the least bit surprised that your skills were impaired by having a pint with your lunch, but thats not the kind of levels of blood alcohol I'm talking about. Its quite reasonable to expect somebody who drank that amount of alcohol immediately prior to flying to be over the limit. But what if they had that the night before? Would that be criminal? We've seen that even the calibrated breathalysers can return positive results from people who've not touched a drop. What does that say to you about the threshold at which the limit is set? Do you think the measured level is presently reasonable when I could possibly return a positive result simply by going on a diet?
As far as comparing tiredness and inebriation as both being causes for impaired ability I accept that entirely – but there is a difference. In both cases there is potential for error, but if you are dozing quietly in your seat late at night and there is a very loud bang adrenalin will ensure you are awake bloody fast – but it won’t instantly sober you if you are drunk
I beg to differ. For a start if you are dozing in your seat the very loud bang you hear may be you hitting a mountainside. Why not try tracking down some of the graphs which show human performance versus stimulation levels. You'll find performance in the circumstances you describe much poorer than you expect. Having rapidly been placed in the over-stimulated zone of the graph you need to be tip top to get yourself back into a decent performance range and no amount of adrenalin will bring you back into it if you can't think straight. If you're 'drunk' as you like to say, then you're not going to perform well either. But nobody is going to get into a flight deck 'drunk' because it's easy to spot. In comparison a guy who's fractionally above the virtually zero alcohol limit but rested will perform much better in the scenario described than one who is at absolute zero alcohol but tired. In any circumstances. So why get hungup on achieving as near as dammit an absolute zero alcohol limit when you're still prepared to get into an aircraft with a knackered pilot?
The issue of alcohol impairment is important, but the key word is
IMPAIRMENT. Introduce the word
DRUNK and you take the argument away from the rational and towards moral pronouncements. If you want to talk about impairment then fretting about whether the alcohol limit is zero, nearly zero or somewhere above is like worrying that a mosquito has bitten your backside whilst you're standing in the lions den covered in steak.