JAL pilot over the limit in London
 

Nikei Shimbun is reporting that he was 9 times over the limit. Apparently JAL pilots are routinely breathalysed before the flight, which he passed, but a bus driver (taking them out to the plane?) had smelled booze and called the police. Questions are now being asked about the reliability of the breathalysers JAL uses before boarding.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46062122

He was arrested by the police so he will have been breathalysed by them. And he pleaded guilty. So the questions would indeed seem to be reasonable...

1,89 is 2,5 times over the limit for driving in the UK, almost 9 over the limit for committing aviation. Raises serious questions about the individuals ability to make sound decisions, a decision which in this case should have been to call in sick, lock the hotel door and ride it out. An even sounder decision would have been to stay off the juice in suck quantities, as to blow a 1,89 when you report for duty. That's well and truly legless for the majority of people.

Beating the Breathalyser
 

If JAL routinely breathalyse and he passed, and then blew that massive score, its consistent with having a swig of duty free after the test e.g. in the loo but before boarding the crew bus/aircraft. It would explain the massively high result as typically BAC breath readings are falsely high for the first 20 minutes or so then settle down.

According to many of our non-pilot "experts" on this website, the job is so easy that it would not matter one bit if the operator/pilot was drunk.

According to other "experts", the book should be thrown at him.

Make up your minds.....and remember that the average long-haul pilot landing after a transatlantic flight with no sleep is estimated to think and react at the equivalent of 160 mg/100ml. Just a bit short of the JAL First Officer.

Nikei Shimbun reported an extensive list of beverages apparently consumed 2 nights earlier...

One night wasn't it? Started drinking from 6pm Saturday before being due to take off at 7pm Sunday

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Jap...-over-drinking

japan Times reports this:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20.../#.W9wF3FUzbmU

In my much earlier experience of working with the Japanese, there will be considerable loss of face and standing in their community, to the point at which their own existence may become irrelevant and require drastic action. I wonder if the culture is still as prevalent today.

What a way to end a career, he will be feeling the pain for ever.

IG

That was my immediate assumption too, it explains both the passed test as well as the high reading.

JL requires 3 pilots on flights >12 hours. HND-LHR is 12h15m, while the return LHR-HND is 11h45m. So, it would've been within company rules to have only 2 crew for the return flight.

wondering why the post was deleted?

Whatever happened to the Pilot from BA who was reported as being 'drunk' before departing ARN about 10 or 15 years ago? Apparently he was sacked. Was there a prosecution - and if so what was the result?

It's a long time ago but it seems that at the time all the press were reporting that the pilot was drunk - and yet I can find no news of a prosecution. Is it possible that the authorities found that blood test results indicated the pilot was not actually 'drunk', or was it possible that the authorities somehow 'messed up' or 'lost' the tests.

If not prosecuted, or if prosecuted and found not guilty then it would seem unjust that the pilot was sacked.. I believe that because of the uncertainty the pilot was sacked because he had 'brought the company into disrepute'. Is that so?

Interesting stuff.


Kind regards
Exeng

So from you older pilots what do you do if you suspect your colleague has drunk alcohol?

Do you say "call in sick or I turn you in"?
Do you just turn them in?
Ignore?

What I find shocking is that it was the driver who reported it and not one of his colleagues. Is there some Omerta here that us SLF need to be worried about?

Probably this 2003 case below, maybe he copped a walk if the Swedes didn't prosecute but one of the posts in the OSL thread linked below said he was indeed sacked by BA. I don't know what happened, some of these cases make a splash in the media but these days are quietly resolved with a plea bargain and a secret squirrel rehab deal.

With the case in OSL around the same time, the BA captain was sober but allowed his drunk FO to show up for the flight. The OSL BA captain got sentenced to six months in prison.

Contemporaneous PPRuNe discussion of the ARN incident:

https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/...ested-arn.html

and of the OSL incident:

https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/...sentences.html

Has it been confirmed he is local and not expat?

The BBC article linked in Post #3 certainly thinks so...

I wouldn't expect a colleague to 'turn him in' unless the pilot under suspicion, when challenged by his colleague, refused to go sick.

I wasn't there, so can't really comment directly on the incident at hand, but I can say that it can be pretty difficult to detect when a full-time career alcoholic is intoxicated. Chronic continual alcohol consumption changes the way it affects you physiologically. I can think of 2 individuals with whom I worked fairly closely, (not as flight crew) whom I later came to know were pretty much drunk, all the time. Yet they never appeared outwardly to be drunk in the sense of slurring words or staggering or other typical signs of intoxication. "drunk" was simply "normal" for them. Point being, it's not always obvious and certain that someone is intoxicated, and accusing them of showing up intoxicated is a pretty big "no-turning back" step, one that would go badly for the accuser if it turned out that he was mistaken and the accusee was stone cold sober. At the very least, you're now known throughout the airline as the guy accuses co-workers of drinking when they haven't been. So it's understandable that someone might be a little hesitant to ring the "You're drunk and I'm reporting you" bell unless they're pretty confident their suspicions are correct. Would you summon the authorities for a fellow crewmember who wasn't showing outward signs of being drunk and smelled of aftershave and breathmints? What it it turns out he just likes aftershave and breath mints?

Not first , not last .
 

He had been due to be part of a crew flying a Japan Airlines (JAL) flight JL44 to Tokyo but failed a breath test 50 minutes before the departure time.
The Boeing 777 aircraft took off after a 69-minute delay.
- Maybe he went to the toilet on the way to the plane, BUT fair play to the Bus Driver should be promote.

Come on! you had a serious drinking problem, didn't you? You admitted as much.
You lost your job at BA but kept your licence and kept flying, quite a result if you ask me. I would be thanking my lucky star if I was you. You where treated with a LOT more compassion and consideration than many people would advocate in this site

There are a number of aspects to your question. One is that a lack of a criminal conviction is not proof of innocence. A verdict of "Not guilty" does not mean that the court found that the defendant was innocent, just that his guilt wasn't proven" beyond a reasonable doubt". That's a pretty high standard (intentionally so) and it's a long way from having been shown to shown to be innocent. A company making a decision to retain or dismiss an employee is not a court, nor is it a criminal issue, so the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard isn't applicable. If anything it seems like a company would be more guided by the "preponderance of evidence" standard used in civil matters. I would assume that would be the standard which would apply if their decision were to be contested in court (but I may be assuming too much) It also may be that the company's decision to dismiss someone is informed by information not available to a criminal court. Just as a purely hypothetical example, criminal defense counsel might have a blood alcohol test result of 0.12% suppressed, because a piece of lab equipment had missed a mandatory calibration date by a day, so a jury might never see that result. Meanwhile a manager might have seen that report, and might (reasonably) conclude that there's a fairly low probability that the equipment went that badly out of calibration in 24 hours, and choose to be guided by that BAC test result that the jury never saw.

In sum:

Neither the lack of a conviction nor the lack of a prosecution is proof of innocence.

A company is not a criminal court, so employee infractions do not have to be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt."

A company is not a court at all, a court's rules of evidence do not apply, so a company's decision may be based on information which a court wouldn't be allowed to consider.

Stack those together and it's neither remarkable nor outrageous that an employee might be dismissed in an incident that did not result in a criminal conviction.

Par for the course in Korea and Japan.

This happens a lot more often than is reported. It is a serious problem and I've tried to do my part in reducing it through some of the training I do for those that utilize my services.

East Asia has a serious drinking problem and when you mix it in with the Korean and Japanese culture of "Whatever the boss says and does is never wrong" it is a recipe for disaster.

My Mrs. (who is Japanese) reports that this is less of a problem amongst younger generations; bosses are less able to "insist" these days. Does still happen though. Intervening in someone else's private affairs is a big taboo, even if the need to do so it pretty stark. This is a big problem for safety.

Japan tends not to have rules / regulations / laws for things where there is a belief that everyone involved will naturally do the right thing. That's great, right up until they discover it isn't true. And so now we hear that the Japanese government is rushing in new regulations concerning enforcement of pilot sobriety...

If I recall correctly, the incident happened in early 2003 and the pilot was dismissed following a disciplinary hearing. Whatever the grounds for dismissal, if an employee deviates from the employer's standards or contractual requirements I guess the company can terminate employment - assuming disciplinary procedures are applied correctly. The law regarding limits on breath/blood-alcohol levels for aviation workers in the UK was introduced around mid-2003, hence at the time of the event no law was broken (well, not as a result of specific alcohol levels in the body, anyway) and so nothing to prosecute.

Some regulatory authorities, but not all, won't specify a cut-off time for drinking, only that it is an offence to report for duty when unfit due to alcohol or drug consumption, so a real bender at lunchtime can still leave you unfit for most of the following day. Companies can/do give a cut-off time for drinking in their OM, eight to twelve hours seems the most common and even if no state, federal or country laws are broken, (so no prosecution), an individual can still be dismissed for breaching the company OM.

India is one country that has a countrywide law forbidding drink within twelve hours of reporting for duty and I remember a case where the hotel were asked to produce the room service receipts to establish just what time last drinks were ordered. Moral of that story is pay cash and tip well!

Ordering a drink is not proof that one drank it. I have, very occasionally, bought drinks for others....

He was caught in Sweden, so Swedish criminal law would apply.

No, what we're now hearing is the usual Japanese knee-jerk reaction and being seen to be strict guardians of the Right Way.......when we all know how far from the truth that is.

The rules were/are already in force. It's not a matter of doing things because it's the right thing to do. The rules and regulations concerning alcohol and flying duties are there in black and white and this pilot disobeyed them. Will it be just him who is punished? Of course not; that is not the Japanese way.

The Japanese seem absolutely incapable of dealing with the actual trouble-makers and, instead, apply blanket punishments and restrictions to everyone......just in case. The recent ANA manager is a very good case in point. He'd had a few wines and accidentally sat on a woman who was asleep in her lie-flat bed, believing it was his seat. Nothing deliberate. He wasn't wandering the place legless, just a genuine mistake. But, of course, he was considered 'drunk; and instantly fired and now ALL ANA Group employees are banned from consuming alcohol on ANA flights, including in the lounges, even if they are on full fare commuting tickets. All of this just so ANA can turn round and show how they have dealt with such disgraceful behaviour as shown by the manager for sitting in the wrong seat :rolleyes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46231780

This also has the above statistics of 19 infringements and 12 delays, and later:

Japan Airlines will implement a series of measures as a result of the recent breaches.

These include new breathalyser systems at overseas airports and introducing penalties "for flight crew violating the regulated alcohol concentration level".

The new systems are already in place at Heathrow and domestic airports in Japan, the spokesperson said.

They will be introduced at other airports on 19 November.

Pilots will also be prohibited from consuming alcohol in the 24 hours prior to reporting for a flight from Japan, the firm said.