Shell management, if you are indeed management at Shell, please tell me that you respect your pilots as valuable assets in your safety culture. That you treat them accordingly. Provide them with productive and descent rosters conducive to both a professional and personal life and an above industry average salary cheque that reflects the constant demands you, if you are indeed management, put on your flight crews.
If you do indeed provide such terms then you might have at least an anorexic argument to support your views that random alcohol and drug testing is ok. Something along the lines of – IF I offer you the world I expect your world in return.
If a pilot does not appear to be under the influence then he is most likely not. Random testing will not stop those with a problem and only picks up the odd few who have a problem and have not been spotted by their colleagues. Company safety culture and openness is a far more effective tool. But as I have said, if you are an esteemed member of management you would understand such basic human factors points as these.
I am not expecting a response. As this person can’t even be bothered to correct mistakes in his own posts –
“It is clearly a bad week for United with a big fine for major failings in their dandom drug and alcohol screeining programme.”
Few glasses of wine before posting mate? Fatigue after flying an antisocial roster pattern? Or just another arrogant muppet with a chip on his shoulder that he is not as good an operator as those he purports to be part of the management structure for?
If you employ the bottom of the barrel then maybe you have a point. But surely you employ referenced and assessed professionals? Well then your company safety culture and those that dispatch and share the flight deck with an individual that may have a problem, should be enough to identify and HELP those that may present a risk. After all that is one of the reasons we have 2 crew ops and CRM n’est ce pas?
Or are you just a little troll?
Anybody flying today knows that fatigue is a far more ingrained, endemic and serious a problem affecting far more pilots than alcohol and drug taking.
Management, listen to your pilots and concentrate on the real issues.
This is nothing more than a witch hunt