TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082790/0827205.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 4.6 KB | 108 lines

                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 48

Flying Too High in the Sky?


The drinking trial of three Northwest pilots raises safety fears


    For travelers already concerned about airline safety, the
scene in a Moorhead, Minn., bar last March was hardly
reassuring. Captain Norman Prouse, a 22-year veteran of
Northwest Airlines, drank at least 15 and perhaps as many as
20 rum-and-Diet Cokes in an eight-hour stretch. First Officer
Robert Kirchner and flight engineer Joseph Balzer shared at
least six pitchers of beer. Less than 10 hours later, the crew
flew a Boeing 727 with 91 passengers on a 50-minute hop from
the adjacent community of Fargo, N. Dak., to Minneapolis. While
the flight arrived without incident, Northwest fired the
pilots for drinking within 12 hours of flying, and the Federal
Aviation Administration revoked their licenses.

    The former flyers faced further punishment last week as a
jury in Minneapolis deliberated federal criminal charges
against them. Safety groups have been carefully watching the
case, which is the first against commercial pilots under a 1988
law that prohibits persons from operating a common carrier
while under the influence of alcohol. If convicted, the
defendants could each be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison
and ordered to pay $250,000 in fines.

    As attorneys completed their arguments, an article in the
New England Journal of Medicine indicated that even modest
amounts of alcohol could seriously impair a pilot's performance
in the cockpit. The study, by Drs. Jack Modell and James Mountz
of the University of Michigan, urged that pilots be kept from
flying if their blood-alcohol level measures more than 0.01%.
The current FAA limit is 0.04%. In the Northwest case, the
blood-alcohol level of Prouse, 51, was found to be 0.12%
shortly after the flight. Balzer, 35, and Kirchner, 36, had
levels of 0.07% and 0.06%. (The limit for driving a car in many
states is 0.10%.) Prouse's lawyer offered a novel defense: he
argued that his client was a long-standing alcoholic and could
therefore tolerate high concentrations of alcohol in the blood
without becoming drunk.

    Bar patrons said the three pilots seemed shaky when they
finished drinking at the Speak Easy bar on March 7 before their
6:30 a.m. flight. According to witnesses, Kirchner and Balzer
had trouble walking when they left at 10:30 p.m. Prouse fell
over backward in his chair when he tried to stand an hour
later. Prouse returned to the bar about 20 minutes after
leaving to ask for directions to his nearby hotel.

    Alarmed by the pilots' drinking, a bar customer alerted the
Fargo office of the FAA. The patron, a Moorhead lumber
salesman, later testified that "my parents were flying back to
Florida the next day, and I was concerned they would get on a
plane with a bunch of drunken pilots."

    When an FAA inspector confronted Prouse and Kirchner at the
airport at 5:45 a.m., he reported smelling alcohol. Balzer
arrived half an hour later and offered to take "any type of
test." But as the inspector telephoned an FAA safety office,
the pilots completed their preflight preparations and took off.
Disconcerted FAA officials met the crew in Minneapolis and
quickly administered blood tests.

    Despite the potentially dangerous episode, cockpit
drunkenness is relatively rare. According to the Federal
Aviation Administration, the rate of alcoholism is roughly the
same for commercial pilots as for the U.S. population as a
whole, affecting about 1 individual in 7. "We are not in a
general sense concerned about alcohol use," says a spokesman
for the Flight Safety Foundation, a Virginia-based research
group. "We are always on the lookout, but there's no evidence
that we have a significant problem."

    Yet a program launched by the Airline Pilots Association has
encouraged 1,200 problem drinkers, or about 3% of the pilot
work force, to come forward for treatment since 1973. The
flyers keep their jobs and can return to the air after they
have been rehabilitated, which may take six months to a year.
Special monitors, who are usually other pilots, supervise the
recovering alcoholics for an additional two years. Northwest
joined the program only last year. The carrier had previously
grounded problem drinkers for at least two years, a policy that
the airline now acknowledges may have discouraged heavy drinkers
from seeking help.


By John Greenwald. Reported by Ricardo Chavira/Washington and
Marc Hequet/Minneapolis.