Policies vary on drinking and flying

International Herald Tribune
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
PARIS
Pilots should not drink and fly. Every passenger would agree, but international practices are far from consistent, with regulations on substance abuse varying wildly and global regulators admitting they cannot enforce standardized rules.
From "bottle-to-throttle" times to blood alcohol levels, from testing to recertification, norms and enforcement differ from country to country and airline to airline. Some airlines Breathalyze every pilot, some none. Some rely on colleagues to report offenders.
Moreover, in an increasingly globalized world, efforts to create international norms are hardly imbued with urgency. Rules now under consideration at the 25-nation European Union, for example, are not expected to be enacted for two years.
"We have issued international guidelines for limits on alcohol and other substances for pilots and other flight crew, and that's all we can do," said Denis Chagnon, spokesman for the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization. "It's almost impossible to harmonize regulations for every state and country in the world because of differences in culture and national and state legislation. Each country can only adopt regulations that work with their existing laws."
To be sure, alcohol abuse among pilots is rare. But international passengers take notice each time an instance is reported, as occurred this month.
In that incident, a female pilot for EasyJet, the low-cost British airline, was suspended after suspicious colleagues reported her.
Had she been flying for Japan Airlines instead, she would have been grounded before approaching the plane by a mandatory Breathalyzer test.
"We test all cockpit crew before each flight - no exceptions," said a spokesman for JAL, Geoffrey Tudor.
Japan Airlines prohibits pilots from imbibing alcohol within a 12-hour period before flight duty, Tudor said: "Even if there is no impairment, any cockpit crew member known to have taken alcohol within this period would not be permitted to fly."
The level of alcohol in the bloodstream allowed by the airline is zero. This is the limit advised by the Japan Civil Aviation Bureau, Tudor said, and all Japanese carriers adhere to it.
In Britain, in contrast, the alcohol limit for pilots and other air crew is set at 20 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood. A spokesman for Britain's Transport Department, David Stewart, described this as "bordering on no alcohol." However, he added, British airlines are not encouraged to conduct random Breathalyzer tests on pilots.
"The government does not believe it's the right thing to do," said Stewart. "It's a question of individual rights."
There is a similar policy at Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific Airways, one of Asia's largest carriers. The airline does not currently conduct random Breathalyzer tests on its pilots, who are predominantly British or Australian.
"We have a 10-hour bottle-to-throttle rule," said a senior pilot for the airline who did not wish to be identified. "We can't have any alcohol in the blood, and we're not supposed to even have a hangover," he said. "But nobody checks. It's an honor system."
A Cathay Pacific spokeswoman, Carolyn Leung, declined to comment, but the Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department indicated Monday, in response to a question from the International Herald Tribune, that a change was being considered. "Existing legislation," the department said in an e-mail, does not allow "random checks on pilots." But "the need to legislate such a requirement," it said, "is being looked at."
In the nearly 60 years that Cathay Pacific has been in service, no pilot has ever been found to have violated the company's regulations on alcohol levels, according to employees of the airline. But the same cannot be said of pilots representing other airlines.
In 2000, a British investigative news program secretly filmed 10 British Airways pilots drinking before reporting for duty; in 2004, two British Airways pilots were arrested for surpassing the company's alcohol limit. And in the United States this month, an AirTran Airways pilot made it all the way to the cockpit before being hauled off the plane and charged with operating an aircraft under the influence.
As for EasyJet, the female pilot was the first air crew member to be suspended in nearly a decade of operations.
Overall in Britain, where there are 10,850 pilots, the country's Civil Aviation Authority reports 12 to 15 violations a year of the rules on alcohol consumption. Last year, Britain began enforcing a law that increased the powers of the police to test suspected offenders. Pilots found to have exceeded the alcohol limit now face fines of up to £5,000, or $9,300, and/or two years in prison. Britain is also in the process of adopting the United States' system of peer intervention, where air crew are urged to report on colleagues they suspect of being unfit to fly.
Some efforts are now being made to harmonize the airline industry's regulations on substance abuse and testing.
In Europe, the European Aviation Safety Agency, a consulting body for the European Union's aviation sector that aims to play a regulatory role not unlike the U.S. federal aviation agency, recently proposed a set of "essential requirements" for the European Union.

text source: International Herald Tribune
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