Passengers Outraged At Airline For Suspending Flight, Turns Out Both Pilots Were Hammered

WJ Cope10 years ago

Two pilots on a flight set to depart from Scotland were arrested yesterday for allegedly being intoxicated when they were supposed to fly.

From CNN:

Two pilots’ alleged tippling delayed a trans-Atlantic Air Transat flight and landed the crew members in jail, police and the airline said.

The Montreal-based airline delayed a flight from Glasgow, Scotland, to Toronto on Monday, to the consternation of passengers — though some changed their tune upon learning that they’d potentially dodged a disaster by not taking off with the reportedly drunken pilots.

Police Scotland did not release the pilots’ names but said “two men aged 39 and 37 years have been arrested in relation to being allegedly impaired through alcohol under the Railway and Transport Safety Act 2003.”

There have been incidents of drunk pilots before, and even the movie Flight in the recent past, but I’ve never heard of both pilots being drunk for the same flight. These clowns probably have a system where one of them drinks and the other stays sober for each flight, but they obviously didn’t coordinate this one very well. Despite this nonsense, the biggest surprise of this story for me was how many of the passengers reacted.

I totally get the outrage about the flight being canceled, but these people have to understand that the alternative might have been a date with the bottom of the Atlantic. No matter how badly you wanted to get to Toronto (for some reason), your odds of getting there in one piece with two drunk pilots at the helm are noticeably slimmer than normal.

I would also like to point out CNN’s use of the word “tippling” to describe the drinking of the pilots. I looked the word up and discovered that it was used frequently to describe the sale of alcohol in the 15th century. Get with the times, CNN. The pilots were not “tippling.” They were hammered..

[via CNN]

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