10 month sentence in court earlier today for the Japanese pilot. 9 times over the limit.

Rob

I'm devastated, the company I work for has cancelled the 2018 Christmas party due to the recent alcohol incidents. I kid you not!

What I want to know is what drives a guy to kill off his career like that? I'm not defending his actions but I do feel sorry for him in respect of whatever made him take that road to professional suicide!

Japan has a horrible alcohol problem. Binge drinking after work is extremely common and almost mandatory at many companies. Combine that with the males of the society being viewed as ATM's for the family and you have a recipe for alcoholism. Anyone who's walked through a busy area of Tokyo in the evening, or better yet ridden a train there at night, has seen it.

add to the problem, a society which shuns any admission of suffering from alcoholism, depression, etc. and you get people painted into corners by society, resulting in things like this and worse happening

Not everyone who shows to work under the influence is an alcoholic/problem drinker. Sometimes it's simply a mistake, or the result of a severe trauma in an individuals live that temporarily gets the better of them. In those cases, 'calling in sick' is an appropriate short term solution. I went through a period like that ~30 years ago, after getting dumped by my (former) fiance. I don't think I ever showed up drunk for work, but I was pretty hungover a few times...
However if it's happening on a regular basis - then you're correct, the person needs help.

I was a flight attendant for one of the large airlines in Japan and never experienced drunk pilots or colleagues in the 2.5 years of flying long-haul. Although paradoxbox is completely right about drinking culture of Japanese business men and office workers (in the worst case, you find them lying around the streets and subway stations, unable to go home and just returning back to work in the morning) but all the crew members I worked with did the exact opposite. It is all about "fitting in" in Japan. You drink with your colleagues to fit into the office culture, but you do not drink more than a glass at dinner to fit in with your pilot cohort. So they can very much behave responsibly. This individual must have had a personal issue to break the rules.
The Japanese culture definitely distributes the responsibility amongst the colleagues, so presumably the other two pilots knew that this guy is intoxicated and would have set him to crew rest for the duration of the flight without reporting it, thus covering for him but also themselves. (Same for cabin crew who might get very ill shortly before a flight back home)
Now that it became a big public issue, the other pilots are probably going to be held responsible for not better supervising their "younger" colleague. I agree that heavy and repeated drinking is an illness, but from my experience this is a minority within the cockpit and cabin crew. Japanese crew proud and overly meticulous in their approach to work and my time felt very much like I was in the military - so strict and diligent! Hai!

Unfortunately the facts don't line up with your assessment.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion...-rules-pilots/

And these are just the guys that were caught. I would imagine the vast majority go undetected.

I left the airline in 2011, so the incident measurement starts 2 years after that. Still, 21 drunk JAL pilots between 2013 and 2018 would equal 0.71 cases per calendar year.

"According to data from the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry shown to an experts’ panel called to discuss the issue, there have been 37 cases since 2013 in which airline pilots were found to have been drinking alcohol beyond the company-set limits before their scheduled flights, 20 of which led to either the cancellation or delay of the flights. Such cases took place in seven of the 25 domestic airline firms, with JAL accounting for 21 of the 37 cases, followed by eight cases involving All Nippon Airways."

But if you want to believe that all JAL pilots are constantly drunk, it's your choice!

So how far will this go?

All Nippon Airways Co said Saturday a co-pilot at its Air Japan Co subsidiary was prevented from flying after testing positive in a pre-flight alcohol check, the latest in a string of similar incidents among Japanese carriers. The co-pilot, in his 40s, had planned to fly without telling his company about his alcohol consumption the night before, ANA said. On Thursday night he consumed between two and three times the limit set by the company, which is equivalent to two mid-sized bottles of beer, or about 1 liter. But he did not tell the company this when he was asked to fly to Yangon, Myanmar, from Narita airport near Tokyo, on Friday, ANA said. He was not initially scheduled to be working on that flight. The pilot started drinking vodka at home before 5 p.m. and the company contacted him around 7:40 p.m. to request that he be on the flight. The company prohibits drinking in the 12 hours before a flight, and the pilot said he had not breached this regulation. The flight to Yangon was scheduled for 11 a.m. He was replaced by another pilot after breathalyzer tests before the flight detected 0.25 milligram of alcohol per liter. The transport ministry on Friday urged another subsidiary of ANA, ANA Wings Co, to improve operations after one of its pilots tested positive in a pre-flight alcohol check. Japan's airline sector has been mired in similar incidents, prompting the ministry to urge airlines to review their alcohol rules and introduce mandatory alcohol tests for pilots.

© KYODO
https://japantoday.com/category/nati...ng-breath-test

A freind of mine at a foreign carrier told me that about 18 months ago, an expat Japanese pilot at his airline was fired for failing a test as well.

And this has been known for years but is in the too difficult/inconvenient box for companies & regulators to deal with. Much easier to nail individual pilots who may have a drink problem in an environment where you can't own up and say so. ALPA sorted this out years ago