Alcohol / drug testing Pilots in the Military

[stilton]

Unfortunately these days it seems like we're often reading about airline Pilots
testing positive for alcohol after showing up for work.



The days of 8 hours bottle to throttle and leaving it to a Pilots judgement are gone, I realize some people are overdoing it but it appears that the pendulum may have swung too far in terms of the incredibly low BAC'S that trigger a positive these days.


What are the standards for military Pilots ? There don't seem to be many reports of these Pilots testing positive for alcohol / drugs.


There has always been a drinking culture amongst civilian and service Pilots.
Is it simply that this is tolerated more in the military still (as it used to be)



Are they subject to random / routine testing ?

[Pontius Navigator]

AFAIK, UK, routine, no, random, yes and post crash yes.

[ShotOne]

On the infrequent occasions military flight crew transit a civil terminal, they may be subject to "with cause" testing in exactly the same way as civil flight crew. As the OP rightly stated, the threshold is very low, 1/4 of drink drive limit. The overwhelming majority of tests are negative and the most common trigger for such a test is treating aviation security personnel with insufficient subservience.

[camelspyyder]

Random drug testing is a part of UK Military life and has been for years.

When the testing team rock up, the base is locked down until they're done.

Aircrew are not exempt from this.

[Lonewolf_50]

Point of reference, from someone who was involved in one of the first waves of the Admiral Hayward "not on my watch, not on my ship, not in my navy" theory that overcame various obstacles and implemented pee in the bottle as a method. Year? 1980. (Service USN)


The general guidance was, when I was in flight school ... 12 hours bottle to throttle.
In the mMid to late 80's it moved to... 12 hours bottle to brief, or entry into the flight duty realm. That extended the "throttle" from bottle by an hour or more for most aircrew.
By the Late 90's the manuals and training began to address lingering effects and advised that if one was drinking a lot, or binge drinking, residual effects might not metabolize at 1-1.5 oz of alcohol per hour, so that in some cases 12 hours would not be long enough for all effects to be purged.


My first pee in the bottle for a random drug test: 1980, as an Ensign. The number of Viet Nam vet mid grade to senior officers who went ape over the piss tests (related to an infamous EA-6B crash due to a pilot self medicating, not smoking dope) was interesting to watch. The flag officers had a unified response; if you don't pee you don't fly. Your sailors pee, you pee.
There were some issues early on. We had a "chain of custody" problem that was highlighted in the Pacific fleet when something like 40% of one large sweep came up positive for dope, which in the 80's/90's was a statistical anomaly that got a lot of people's attention. It was also a bogus result due to piss poor handling of the samples. (pun intended). At the root was how well the labs and the collection process were coordinated, and where a given sample came from.

I lost a sailor who popped positive on a sweep, but the results did not come back until weeks later when we were at sea. His advancement was put on hold for three months while he fought it due to his having seen his home town dentist (he was on leave) and had some work done. The test was "positive for cocaine" but what his dentist had shot into him was not cocaine. (Long and annoying story). All said and done, we got him his stripe back, but when it came time to re enlist, he told the Navy in no uncertain terms to piss off.

Chain of custody issues by the early 1990's were pretty well ironed out. In the process no few people got screwed.
When I retired, 2005: the work hard play hard ethic I embraced as a junior officer had been replaced by "if you drink, you are already a problem." The push towards the warrior monk was well underway. Glad to have left when I did.
The pee in a bottle system is alive and well in the USN. It is now an embedded part of the culture, but at least most of the procedures have had the bugs ironed out.

[BEagle]

Indeed.

When the willy-watchers turned up at Brize once, one of the 'random' selectees invited to piddle into their test tubes was the Stn Cdr, known to many as 'Kelvin Rucksack' (As in 'Kelvin'=an absolute zero; 'Rucksack'=everyone's had to carry him at some time or other).

"Doesn't surprise me", quoth one wag, "People have been taking the pi$$ out of him for years...!"

[Pontius Navigator]

LW, I remember see rehab facilities at Kef in the 80s as zero tolerance could have seen the place decimated.

Drink wise I saw the US officers drier than UK though I did see examples of extreme drunk driving in OK. Our driver "she only f^cks majors" swigging champagne from a bottle as she drove her 4x4 out of the car park, over the barrier and ditch and in sight of the guard post.

[stilton]

So, it sounds like military Pilots are not under the same level of scrutiny.



Glad to hear the world hasn't completely stopped making sense.

[teeteringhead]

Always thought it was no smoking within 8 hrs of flying, and no drinking within 50 ft of an aircraft......


........ so that's where I went wrong.

[Fareastdriver]

On the civil side an oil company insisted on random breath checks on we pilots at our base in China. There were no facilities for doing it in Shekou so it would have to be done in Hong Kong.

Every other Thursday, or thereabouts, our chief engineer, a teetotaler, would catch the ferry to HK and be breathalysed.

Meanwhile, back in the bar.

[KPax]

Although I never witnessed anything that gave me concern at Akrotiri, it would have been interesting to have had these testers during an APC, especially if they were testing for alcohol.

[teeteringhead]

As a serious contribution, I was once involved in a case where we believed someone who worked for me had had a drink "spiked" with some sort of hallucinogen - LSD or similar.

As there was also lots of drink taken taken - it was at a Section party - it was a while before the suspicions of "more than just alcohol" arose. Our MO said that too much time had elapsed for the usual blood test to prove anything, but suggested - now comes the interesting/scary bit - that we could try and use British Rail facilities as they had "much more sensitive drug testing facilities"! WTF! Why?

This was about 20-odd years ago, so don't know if it's still true...........