Flying Too High in the Sky?

By John Greenwald

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.

With reporting by Ricardo Chavira/Washington and Marc Hequet/Minneapolis