Anyway, for whatever reason, and no doubt having lost his temper already, he threatened to crash his plane into the offices of the local council.
My, how they laughed.
Seeing as he was then an FO with a well known uk IT operator, they called the chief pilot, who grounded my chum immediately.
I should stress that he was a perfectly normal guy, well as normal as most pilots I know anyway.
You'd probably be out of a flying job most places in the U.S. if you threatened to crash a plane into a building these days.
The loose cannon rhetoric of a couple of decades ago, e.g. 'kill all the scabs', is no longer laughed off as the excesses of emotion at contract time.
As with most recent personnel matters, I've only got hearsay information but I believe a couple of my coworkers have been removed from flying, perhaps permanently, due to threats of what the company has deemed workplace violence. One alleged threat was verbal with multiple witnesses, the other was on social media.
Three decades ago, self-appointed geniuses like Captain WOW at Delta would be somewhat protected by ALPA from company attempts to reign in increasingly bizarre speech and behavior at work. At least he was able to get some sort of settlement when the feds pulled his medical as I recall.
Twenty years ago, Captain Barney at FedEx did an early social media press to test when he made statements deemed to be threatening on the ALPA FedEx CompuServe forum. The company demanded that he submit to a psych exam which is contractual at most U.S. carriers. He initially agreed but then refused citing a conspiracy to end his employability as a pilot.
Since it was argued that more scrutiny of Auburn Calloway's behavior might have prevented the recently attempted FedEx DC-10 hijacking, it was difficult for ALPA to defend Barnhart's statements as merely passionate viewpoints and constitutionally protected speech. Captain Barnhart was fired by FedEx and never got his job back.
I would suggest that tolerance for speech or behavior out of the norm (with a few exceptions) is even less these days in the pilot workplace.