Ok people, can you give me answers to the following scenario:-
A pilot turns up for work and someone thinks that they might smell alchohol on his/her breath. Further investigation is needed but the pilot is allowed to continue (by the management) on the next sector. By the end of the final sector the management decide to suspend the pilot on thinking he/she was under the influence. Who is now to blame. The pilot is innocent but the management have let him/her fly the sector thinking that the they were under the influence.?
ILS 119.5

And your point being ILS 119.5? I fail to see what relevance various scenarios such as yours have.

But if you want an opinion:

If 'someone' took it no further then nothing would be done. If they told the airline management then I cannot see any UK management just 'ignoring' the warning in order to get the next sector flown. They would most likely want to cover their backsides, even if they didn't have a safety culture. If they then suspended the pilot with no evidence other than hearsay then they would likely be on the losing end of an employment tribunal.

PP

Sorry, all i'm asking is, who is to blame in this scenario. Pilots or Management.

ILS 119.5

Unless this is some form of trick question...Your line, 'the pilot is innocent', implies he's not been drinking, ergo, he has commited no offence, there is therefore no 'fault' how can there be? Your senario is he's done nothing wrong......

Like Pilot Pete I am wondering quite what your point is???????????

OK points taken. What if, after landing the pilot is suspended beccause it was thought that he/she attended work and flew under the influence of alchohol. There is no conclusive proof but the management let the pilot fly whilst under suspicion. Do you not think that there is negligence on the management for not initially suspending the pilot concerned.
All i'm trying to do is point out possible flaws in the system which need to be rectified.
ILS 119.5

ILS 119.5

Er, I am still not sure what point you are trying to prove.

If nothing has happened, then there can be no negligence on anyones behalf.

Going back to your original senario, if the pilot has turned up and someones gone to managment before he gets to the plane, then I would presume that any management in any occupation where the amount of alcohol consumed by its staff is controlled by law would be very silly to allow the person to work. It could be seen as aiding and abetting an offence, but on that I think you would need the opinon of someone like Flying Lawyer.

With reference to alcohol in particular, there seems to be a problem of an objective determination of a pilots level of impairment prior to flight.
"He smelled/looked/acted like he was impaired" is a recipe for huge mistakes. Something more objective is needed.

What is interesting is that this may be begging another safety question.
Going back to the basic assumption that the reason for alcohol and other restrictions is to ensure safety, could it not be argued that there is a case for examining duty limits to ensure at least an equivalent level of safety?

ZQA297/30

There are 2 Criminal Offences now...One has to do with impairment, the other does not.

Legislation came in earlier this year, which is the RAILWAYS and TRANSPORT SAFETY ACT 2003

There are 2 offences related to drinking contained in it.

Section 92. Being unfit for duty. This is what it implies, being unfit is not capable of doing your job due to alcohol (or Drugs).

The new act is related to drink driving offences in the Road Traffic Acts. In that, (in section 92)the initial suspicision that normaly leads to arrest is a Constables opinon. To some extent thats subjective, but he would be looking for impairment. Basicly when I was a baby Policeman I was told if he falls out of the car nick him for being unfit. Otherwise.....

The other section is Section 93. This has nothing to do with impairment, just that you try to do your job with a Blood Alcohol Concentration above a prescribed limit. That limit is set in the act as 20 milligrammes of alcohol in 100 millilitres. That represents 1/4 of the drinking and driving prescribed limit.

There does not have to be evidence of impairment, and you can be breath tested (the same as you can be in drink driving cases) by a constable if he suspects you are on duty with a BAC above the limit, or if you are involved in an accident or involved in an incident.

The suspicision can come from many things, the way someone acts, a smell (and not just of alcohol, mints is a give away) or having just seen the person down a pint. The intial suspcision could also come from someone else, ie, bus driver smelling what he thinks is alcohol and calls Police. They turn up, smell alcohol which then gives the Constable reason to suspect that he may be commiting the offence thus giving reason to breath test. It is as a result of that breath test that you would be arrested, not as the result of what the driver of a bus thinks.

On having Breath/Blood or urine tested at a Police station the person would then either be charged and appear at court, or if the BAC are below the limit released. As with Stocks and shares, BAC goes up as well as down. Have 3 pints and BAC will continue to rise for some time afterwards....Then go down.

There is no way of reliably telling how fast the alcohol gets out of your system. And this section is NOT related to impairment.

I will rephrase my sentence.
"He smelled/looked/acted like he had a BAC of more than 20mg per 100ml". Does a person who has 20mg per dl smell, look, or act in a manner that would betray this?
Come to think of it, just what is the rationale behind this particular limit of BAC?

BJCC says

"The intial suspcision could also come from someone else, ie, bus driver smelling what he thinks is alcohol and calls Police. "

There where 5 other people in the bus with the Captain in question. They did not notice anything suspicious in his behaviour nor did they smell anything.

If I have to fly to UK I will make sure that bus drivers I encounter are informed of my zero alcohol policy (Make em smell me).

Not only alcohol, there's more..... :eek:

"the way someone acts, a smell (and not just of alcohol, mints is a give away) "

Perhaps rather than take breath mints, to avoid a bus driver report, it would be preferable for the whole crew to turn up with "dragons breath" in the morning. :ugh:
Mouth wash is out of the question as most contain alcohol and might fail a pc plod breathalyser. (With zero BAC)

Regarding the 'limits' just mentioned, it is all very well being on or just under the limit on the ground....but at cabin alt of 8000' or so the effect of alcohol is effectively doubled.

If I am flying within 24hrs I will not drink...it doesn't drag my life into depression.
The reliance on alcohol by people is astonishing...get a life

ZQA297/30

The bus driver, or anyone else would not be quoting a guessed BAC, just that someone maybe smelt of drink, was acting in a way that made him think he had been drinking or maybe had seen someone down a pint....irrespective of that its not his evidence that leads to arrest. If Police are called, and then form the suspicison, based parlty on on the informant has said and partly on what he finds when he arrives, they will then breath test the pilot. The result of that breath test is the direct evidence which lead to the arrest. The bus driver/5 other crew members or anything else is then irrelevent. The Breath test is either pass or fail. Mouthwash will not cause the breath test to be positive if it has been used more than 1/2 hour before the test is administered. I, and most other policemen I know used to ask specificly if someone had used it and if they had waited 1/2 hour before giving the breath test. I think you are relying on urban myth for that one.....

What I said was that the way someone acts, smell (mints being a give away) were all things that could lead to suspcision. At the end of the day, if you have not got a BAC above the presribed limit, you will pass....everyone is then happy.

I have no idea why Goverment fixed the limit at the level they did....I presume on advice from SRG Medical people...


Atlanta-Driver

It is niether the bus driver, nor the other crew members on the bus that make the decision to breath test. The Police officer called to this made that decision. He would have done that based on his findings.

The Pilot was arrested. There are only 3 reaons why that would happen.

1. He failed the screening breath test.
2. He refused to take the breath test
3. He agreed to take it, but then didn't carry it out properly eg, blew round the tube or sucked rather than blew.

So in oder to fail the test, he must have had a BAC above the limit. Or refused to take it, which is his own fault..(but not lightly to have happened from what I gather in this case)

He appears to have apssed the evidencial test conducted at the Police station. Be that breath or blood. The obvious reason being that his BAC was going down and went below the limit between the first and evidencial tests.

It was not the yoghurt
 

Unfortunately it was not the youghurt. The 50-year-old Finnish 757 driver's blood contained alcohol and he has agreed to leave Finnair with a withdrawn ATPL. Reportedly he had had some shots from the hotel minibar in MAN the night before the flight, because he couldn't sleep.

After support from his colleagues, Finnair reportedly decided to go the soft way on the pilot; he does not fly anymore, but he will keep retirement benefits cumulated up until now. This is due to an immaculate almost 30 years' record with the airline.

Sources inside Finnair in Helsinki.

pilotbear,
you have a good point about the effect of altitude.
The following is an extract from a bmj article on the effect of length of "wakefulness" on performance of of simple mental and co-ordination tasks.
The fact that it is compared to the effects of alcohol, and has been done at "only" sea level leads one to wonder how safe the current duty limits are in the real world. Please note the legal driving limit is the comparison point, not the 20mg per dl.

http://oem.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/57/10/649

Quote (from way down near the end)

"The overall implications of the results of this study are clear. They show that the effects on performance of moderate periods of being awake cannot be discounted. Sleep is needed after the end of a day if adverse effects on performance are to be avoided. Most importantly, this study has allowed interpretation of these effects on performance in terms of an accepted standard for safety. With a legal limit for alcohol use when driving as a standard, the results show that after 17-19 hours of wakefulness, subjects' performance on many tests had dropped to that found at the legal limits for safe driving. Many people remain awake for periods of 16 hours or more for reasons of work, family, or social life. These results suggest that after this duration of wakefulness fatigue reaches a level that can compromise safe performance.
The results also imply that many countries which set allowable BACs at the point that compromises safe performance should consider developing similar standards for fatigue to ensure that people who have had 18 hours or longer without sleep are kept from at risk behaviours such as driving, piloting aircraft, or operating machinery. "

Pilot is charged with being drunk
 

I have to say, fair enough that he has been done by all accounts, although hats off to Finnair in their treatment.

Update
BBC News

Anybody going to apologise to the taxi driver about their remarks?

He could just have prevented a major accident.

Having "skipped" through the above posts why does it give you the impression that pilots don't get drunk.

Let alone turn up for work under the influence, but it has turned out they are human after all :hmm:

I have a well paid interesting job which involves a lot of driving, and if I or any of my colleagues where found over the limit we would be out of a job, no pension, and everything else that goes with it.

So let's hope that more taxi drivers are not affraid of nice uniforms with bits of braid, and report ANYONE whom appears to have been drinking.

Standing by for the flames:cool: