Quoted:
Be careful how you make your jokes. If you joke that you saw the pilots drinking in the bar earlier at while on my flight, I'm going to stop the flight. Both of us will walk off the plane and get a piss test right then and there, to make sure nobody questions my sobriety.
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They don't do piss tests for alcohol, at least not that I've ever heard of. It's either breath or blood. You must be drunk. [img]http://www.ar15.com/members/albums/Chimborazo/beer.gif[/img] [:D]
Seriously, though -- if someone made a false claim, IMHO the proper scenario would be exactly as you describe: stop the flight, test the pilots. If the pilots test clean, then haul the asshole off to jail for disrupting the flight. If the pilots test drunk, then haul the assholes off to jail for attempting to endanger an entire planeload of passengers.
I hope you folks realize just how disgusted, the vast majority of pilots are, at the prospect that these two are really guilty of what they are charged with.
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I didn't realize there was any doubt. They got tested and were found to be over the .08 limit, which meant that they were legally drunk when they drove to the airport, and still legally drunk when they pulled away from the gate.
I'm not surprised that America West has had these problems. From what I've read, they have the worst maintenance record of any airline. If I recall correctly, the FAA nearly shut them down a year or two ago because of it.
A couple of Seattle Times articles mentioning it:
[url]http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=faa09&date=20001209[/url]
[url]http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=airsafety24&date=20020224[/url]