United Airlines has suspended a pilot who was arrested in London on suspicion that he was about to fly a Boeing 767 with 124 passengers while exceeding the legal limit for alcohol.
The incident occurring on Nov. 9 involved United Flight 949, which was bound for Chicago. The passengers were accommodated on other flights.
The 51-year-old pilot was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport and freed on bail pending the results of alcohol tests, London metropolitan police spokesman Simon Fisher said.
"Safety is our highest priority and the pilot has been removed from service while we are cooperating with authorities and conducting a full investigation," said UAL spokeswoman Megan McCarthy. "United’s alcohol policy is among the strictest in the industry, and we have no tolerance for violation of this well-established policy," she added.
In another recent incident involving airline safety, the two pilots of a Northwest Airlines jetliner became distracted and overshot the airport at Minneapolis-St. Paul. Their licenses were pulled by the FAA, but they have appealed their license revocations.
Northwest Flight 188. an Airbus A-320 (NO3274), en route from San Diego, CA with 144 passengers and a crew of five, passed over its intended destination at 37,000 feet on Oct. 21.. It eventually circled back and landed safely in Minneapolis. The pilots told NTSB investigators they were working on personal computers and engrossed in discussing work issues.
Air traffic controllers in Denver and Minneapolis tried to raise the crew without success.
The Air National Guard had put fighter jets on alert at two locations, but did not intercept the errant airliner in the end.
The arrest of the United pilot is but the latest in a series of incidents involving airline pilots and alcohol.
According to the Associated Press, he is the third U.S. commercial pilot arrested in 13 months on alcohol-related charges. And in 2008, 13 pilots violated the FAA’s alcohol rules.
In May, the AP noted, an American Airlines pilot was arrested at Heathrow and charged with being under the influence of alcohol. Another United pilot was arrested on the same charge in October 2008. And a Southwest Airlines pilot was suspended in January after allegedly showing up for his flight in Ohio reeking of alcohol.
Commercial airline pilots are prohibited from drinking any alcohol in the eight hours before reporting for work, a provision known on the job as the "bottle-to-throttle" rule.
FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt, a former head of the Air Line Pilots Association, recently weighed in on the subject of pilot professionalism in a speech at the International Aviation Club in Washington entitled "Bumps in the Road."
Stated the veteran airline pilot now charged with U.S. air safety:
Lately, aviation has had quite a few bumps in the road, and if we’re candid with ourselves, many of these bumps are indeed self-inflicted.
When you look at today’s headlines, you see that aviation has been hit with a wave of bumps we can label quite appropriately as an extreme need to refocus on professionalism. And perhaps we even need to develop a better understanding of professionalism.
The overshoot of Minneapolis is a very sad example. As a pilot, it doesn’t matter much whether they were using their laptops, or re-enacting the Lincoln-Douglas debates — what they did was wrong and they lost total situational awareness and that’s why their Airman’s Certificates have been revoked. There is no substitute for situational awareness. They knew a lot better and they were trained a lot better. And they ignored it. But especially in the context of our push for professionalism, this whole incident is extremely disappointing.
The passengers aboard that airplane sat comfortably because they assumed that the people up front were paying attention. Being distracted by compound problems is always a risk in the cockpit, which is why the captain and the first officer are trained and professional paid positions. You get paid to be a professional. That’s actually the definition of the difference between being a professional and an amateur.
But I think that this is a sign of a much bigger problem. I can’t regulate professionalism. With everything we know about human factors, there are still those who just ignore the common sense rules of safety. At the top of the list is something every pilot has heard over the years from their flight instructors: Remember to first always fly the airplane.
I wish this were the only instance of a loss of focus, but it’s not. Listen to the cockpit tapes from the (Colgan Air) accident in Buffalo. Same problem, the one thing those two were supposed to do is the one thing they didn’t: pay attention. Juxtapose that with (hero of the Hudson USAirways) Captain Sullenberger. There was not one second of less than total concentration. That crew was the epitome of professionalism and a textbook case of focus by everyone, including the controllers. That is an example of being in the game especially when the stakes are so high.
