The Civil Aviation Authority has withdrawn Mr Beaton’s medical certificate, banning him from flying.
“An airline must immediately inform us if a UK pilot has misused drink or drugs boarding, or being on board, an aircraft,” a CAA spokesperson told Sky News.
"In these cases we would immediately suspend the pilot’s medical which means they cannot fly.
“In most cases the pilot would have an assessment with an expert medical team and if they wished to return to flying then a comprehensive rehabilitation programme would be put in place,” the spokesperson said.
“At the end of that process the medical would only be reinstated if we were completely satisfied.”
I may be profoundly lecherous, but my education is sadly lacking in the Classics.
I’ll take one for the team here and admit my ignorance and plead for someone of more refined knowledge to explain it to me and the rest of the silent head-scratchers out there. Shame we don’t have the old :question marks over head: smiley like on vBulletin.
The Jalopnik article cited in the OP quotes the now-former pilot’s text as saying “…, a bit of snogging, …”.
My high-register BritSpeak is decent, but my British slang is weak. Would “snogging” be drinking, making out short of sex, outright sex, or something completely different?
Can’t fly if you have them in your system. Also can’t fly if you have an illness for which those things are necessary. If one got drug tested and came back positive there’s a small window to present an affirmative defense before medical authorities. But that’s really aimed at identifying and exonerating residuals after legit use for a legit reason with records of your non-flying during the time in question. The details get fuzzy quickly and are much more individual case sensitive.
So still bad, but not at the “shoot first and ask questions later … maybe” stage like the “hero” of this thread.
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
–Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
Hence my amused reaction to “the pilot’s wife has declined to comment”. Silent to the media, yes, but I bet she has some choice words for him, and many of them. And those words may include terms like “my lawyer”.
What I find nothing short of wondrous is… ok; you do a tremendously stupid thing that will destroy your job, your marriage and very likely your life. Knowing that…
Why the everloving FUCK are you going around telling it?!?!?!?!
Airline pilots are similar to surgeons in that they have people’s lives in their hands every day. For some narcissistic personality types I’m sure that can bring out a god complex that they are untouchable. Modern cockpit resource management training (or even job interview procedures) will catch extreme cases, but there’s sometimes a fine line between assertiveness and narcissism.
Half the fun of doing cool shit is bragging about it later.
The critical skill is having some sense of which cool stuff is so far out you need to keep it a secret from everyone forever, which cool stuff can be told to your close friends who’re also cultural peers (AKA other pilots of his age group), and which shit you can publish on the internet.
Besides being something really wrong to do in the first place, that event was a category 1:“sooper sekrit” event that he treated as category 3:“tell ze vorld!”. Oops.
The term is now “Crew Resource Management” because it was found some years ago that the former use of ‘cockpit’ seemingly excluded flight attendants, ground personnel, ATC, etc. They want us thinking about, and using, all resources when needed.
The conflict between assertiveness and narcissism… I’ve sometimes thought of it more as the line between confidence and cockiness. Pilots have to be confident in their skills or we can’t do the job. But push confidence too far and it metastasizes into something dangerous.
I am by nature a fairly humble person, and some of the best pilots I’ve flown with have that trait too. But it can also be a hindrance because too much humble can lead to indecision and inaction. So there’s a sweet spot in which confidence and caution co-exist. Not always easy to occupy that spot.
There was a baseball player on the 1986 Mets who, when asked how he could function in a high pressure World Series at-bat, said he ‘had the ability to think about nothing’. I wish I had that, because I suspect the best of my colleagues can do it.
Anyway, I think this BA pilot let his overall confidence get away from him. Sad way to end a career.
I know nothing of the guy’s age or career background.
But an airline like BA is almost all long haul. Which puts young men on big ego-boosting airplanes going to distant ego-boosting exotic destinations rather early in their career.
As well the well-known retirement wave and resulting replacement of old farts like me with young bucks who’ve maybe not had much experience in life yet affects the Brits as much as the US-based companies.
So now you’ve got some guy who decided to become a pilot, works flying turboprops for 6 months then suddenly RJs for 6 months then suddenly he’s a newbie 787 FO for BA, the creme de la creme of his nation’s pilot career. And he’s age 25 making the equivalent of nearly $200K/year.
Easy for that to go to a guy’s head. Both of them. With predictable results at the worst case.
