Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 17, 1990 TAG: 9007170072
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Everyone aboard, a pilot hops through the hatch, closes it and makes his way to the cockpit. As he passes by, he stumbles, smelling of booze.
That happened more than a decade ago to Dennis Price, a Virginia Tech professor flying to Washington from Baltimore on an airline whose name he says he can't recall.
"It was obvious he was under the influence of alcohol. There was no doubt about it," he said in an interview, confessing he did not know what to do. He sat there. "You could smell it and also observe he wasn't stable."
Price relaxed a little when the man climbed into the right-hand co-pilot's seat. The flight arrived safely in Washington, but Price still wonders if the co-pilot could have taken command of the plane if some emergency had forced the pilot to surrender the controls.
An industrial safety specialist, Price has spent the past six years studying the effects of alcohol on human performance. And based on some of his findings at Tech's Human Factors Engineering Center, he says the Federal Aviation Administration's guidelines governing pilots and their use of alcohol should be stiffened.
Pilots are required to wait at least eight hours from their last drink before jumping into the cockpit, and they are not allowed to fly under the influence of alcohol. Pilots are considered "under the influence" if their blood alcohol concentration exceeds 0.04 percent. By contrast, most states have a 0.10 percent legal limit for driving a car.
Price says the eight-hour rule is a bad one, sometimes incorrectly assuming that a person is not intoxicated eight hours after the last drink. Whether eight hours is a sufficient waiting period depends on how much alcohol was consumed, how much - if any - food was consumed and other individual traits.
The Tech professor, himself an instrument-rated pilot, would like to see the FAA increase that waiting period to 24 hours and, if possible, institute a screening program for pilots.
"We can do a preflight check on the aircraft, but as yet we don't have a good preflight check on a pilot who's controlling the aircraft," he said.
The FAA, for its part, said late last year that it would consider a random screening program for alcohol use among commercial pilots - much like the program already under way to detect drug use.
Last May, three Northwest Airlines pilots were arrested in Minneapolis and charged with flying while under the influence of alcohol. The pilots, who have since been fired, denied the charges. Their trial is scheduled to begin this month.
Since 1984, 61 professional pilots have had their licenses suspended or revoked for flying while drunk. About 85 percent of the pilots who have problems with alcohol are flagged by fellow pilots.
In arguing for stiffer FAA guidelines, Price says the issue is not that pilots cannot fly successfully from point A to point B at higher levels of blood alcohol concentration. It's when an engine fails or a storm develops that pilots need to be razor sharp, and alcohol - even very low levels - can impair judgment and performance.
Using Breathalyzer tests on hundreds of carefully screened subjects who have been given alcoholic drinks mixed according to body weight, Price's research has found that problem-solving, decision-making and finger movements are affected by blood alcohol concentrations as low as 0.03 percent.
And that can cause problems if an impaired pilot hits the wrong keys when programming an airplane's flight management system, he said.
"The basic issue is fitness to fly on a given day," Price said, acknowledging that it could prove difficult to devise a screening process that is effective, efficient and acceptable to pilots across the country.
by CNB