It’s always the British Airways Africa flights. A co-pilot snorted coke off of a woman’s breasts the night before a Johannesburg – London flight last month and put details of a substance-fueled orgy in writing in a series of texts to a flight attendant before trying to work the trip home. She reported it and the flight was cancelled. He was drug tested on arrival back in London and fired.
Thinking he was sharing a tale of exploits with a friend, the pilot texted the crewmember that he’d “been a very naughty boy” on his layover when he went out to a club.
The pilot boasted: “We all walk (stagger) back up to the hotel bar for ‘one last one before bed’…“Couple of drinks in the bar, bit of snogging, and then we’re somehow all on our way to this dude’s flat.
…He bragged about how the “girls are dancing topless”, and he decided to strip off too — before some Class A drugs arrived. …“I’ve lost my shirt somewhere and one of the local lads produces a plate with a few lines of coke. …“That’s the story of how I ended up snorting coke off a girl’s t**s in Joburg.”
This was a dumb thing to do. You might think, why did he confess? But he wasn’t confessing, he was bragging.
According to British Airways, “Safety is always our top priority. The matter was referred to the CAA and this individual no longer works for us.”
Meanwhile, the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority reports,
An airline must immediately inform us if a UK pilot has misused drink or drugs boarding, or being on board, an aircraft.
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 medical would only be reinstated if we were completely satisfied.
A decade ago British Airways Mixed Fleet cabin crew reportedly would party pretty extensively at the Ole Sereni Hotel in Nairobi, but Johannesburg has been a well known spot for some time as well. Several years ago flight attendants at BA were told they had to stop running naked through the halls of their layover hotels. But it’s usually just been antics in good fun, not hard drugs.
(HT: @istrakhov)
Folks on these kinds of blogs tend to give outsized deference to commercial pilots. Ones I’ve known personally, including family, are of middling intelligence and character. I regard them as essentially bus drivers – actually, bus drivers have a more difficult job and have more wits about them.
You start paying pilots $400K a year, give them god like status as being something more than they are, and it’s inevitable you will see this. And It will only get worse.
Jake and Stuart… Haters gonna hate.
@Steve Pilots gonna snort.
@Stuart
A BA First Officer probably barely makes 1/4 of that. Completely different market over there. Any other ignorant and presumptive comments?
I don’t care what you do in your time off but the hours before flight aren’t truly time off as you must not be impaired when you actually fly.
@Dan well, he also owns a “Luxury Hot Tub Retreat” so I’ll give you that. Lol
Which makes me wonder….when did a hot tub become luxury?
@Stuart,
Have you not been to the UK? A hot tub is a luxury over there!
@ Steve – I don’t hate pilots. I love my BIL pilot. I’m only pointing out they get grossly oversized deference which is not commensurate with who they are and the job that they actually perform
@Jake
Naw you made sure to impress that you have more respect for bus drivers. And as for outsized pay that is a fairly recent development and you know it. On fact for years bus drivers were paid more than the average pilot. Most don’t take themselves too seriously, are thankful for their jobs and are decent people that are shocked by the animosity and envy they see one here sometimes. With all that being said this guy is an irresponsible idiot not worthy of anything but shame, no need to use this as an opportunity to smear the rest of us!
@ Sosongblue – I didn’t say anything about pay, I only mentioned deference. I also didn’t say commercial pilots were not decent people – only that they were middling/normal people, from the dozen or so I’ve gotten to know through my pilot relative. I do have a great deal of respect for bus drivers, who are also middling people, as they navigate an enormous vehicle through incredibly challenging cityscapes, with no autopilot nor co-pilot nor traffic control agent, while sometimes also dealing with unruly passengers without the benefit of any physical protection nor an attendant. And, they’re providing critical mobility to folks who have none otherwise. As mentioned, I regard pilots as being like bus drivers, except with less challenges and support systems than bus drivers – fair enough? As for for the disparity in pay, I imagine that’s due to scarcity of pilots, create by the dubious flight hour requirement, providing their union the upper hand; whereas, there’s no such scarcity of bus drivers.
@Jake
Fair enough you have yet again managed to express your great respect for bus drivers and then proceed to say that being a pilot is “like that” but yet lesser then nonsensically expanding on that, implying you don’t even give pilots the respect you give a bus driver. Personally I give the same level of respect to anyone who does their job professionally in whatever their capacity be it a bus driver, a shoe shiner or a garbage man but that’s just me.
Pride came before the fall. I wouldn’t want to be on a plane with the pilot FWI/FUI.
Jake
A very common misconception and a bad comparison to compare flying a modern airliner to a bus driver. A captain of a large seagoing vessel would be a much better comparison. It’s much less about manually “driving” the ship, but more managing crew, time, fuel, weather, suitable alternate courses of action, your plan a, plan b, plan c, constantly reassessing as you go along your journey….essentially nothing like a bus driver. Now speed it all up at 8 miles a minute and the inability to “pull off the road” easily. No it doesn’t take extraordinary intelligence, but it’s highly specialized, highly skilled and highly repetitive and because of all that most of the public thinks “its easy”, well yes its “easy for us” and shouldn’t be highly challenging because if it was it means 1) something has gone wrong 2) you are an inexperienced pilot or 3) you are a crap pilot! In short it’s nothing like a bus driver, but I agree that would be a very challenging job that deserves respect.
@ Sosongblue – again, melodrama aside, my only point is that people generally give pilots outsized deference relative to the reality of who they are and what they do.
Whip Whitaker would be proud.
I would argue one point about the blog post. I enjoy a good time like anyone but since when did running through the halls of a layover hotel NOT involve drugs and/or alcohol? That’s not something a sober person over 22 years of age would do.
America – A senior long-haul captain in America can be well over $400,000 yearly. It’s not unheard of for captains to make over $500,000 a year.
It’s been known that some make well over $700,000 annually in America, and with some flight crew now receiving pay rises of 40%, this figure is only going up..
In 2023, we expect this average pilot salary to increase by 20-40% over the next four years.
UK – A senior long-haul airline captain’s salary is around £200,000.
So yeah, there’s a difference between Long haul BA pilots and long haul AA, UA, or DL pilots. How this differential factors into bragging about coke snorting off a topless woman, I don’t know.
The notion that you can do anything involving drugs on your time off is flawed. If you are in the transportation involving drugs industries where you have to stay “clean,” there simply is no room for that kind of time off. You are always on and if that type of clean lifestyle doesn’t work for you, you have to find another life of work.
IDIOT!
Coworkers suck
Good for the co-worker for reporting him. 2 years ago, I was in FLL on business and befriended 3 flight attendants and a pilot at the hotel bar. We ended up drinking quite a lot that night – the pilot in particular had WAY too much and we had to physically help him to his room. They were all operating a morning flight. We left a note under his door that he needed to call out sick or he would be reported. One of the FA’s did message me in the morning to confirm that he no-showed for their flight. Thank goodness, but if we hadn’t left the note, who knows?
Let’s all get together and buy Jake a one way F class ticket anywhere he wants to go on a triple 7 with one requirement. He chooses his favorite 3 bus drivers to man the cockpit. Let’s see how his comparison works at that point.
@ CMorgan – well, that’ll be like putting a commercial pilot in the driver’s seat of a bus. I wouldn’t ride on that bus lol. However, after a few hundred hours of on-the-job training, I would gladly take the bus operated by a pilot and the flight operated by a bus driver.
By the way, as I had commented on another post here a few weeks back, the pilot – bus driver analogy actually comes from my BIL commercial pilot, who was a bus driver earlier in his life, and feels that it was a far more difficult and certainly much less appreciated profession.
@jake, well said
Pilot’s a dumbass for texting the wrong person drunk, but haven’t we all?
The reporting FA must be gay or angry / jealous she wasn’t a part of the party.
How do we know he wasn’t going to be outside of the the 8 hour bottle to throttle rule?
I for one am envious of his good time on his night off…
@ Steven – I don’t think we’re saying the same thing lol. This particular, individual pilot exhibited horrendous behavior, not at all reflective of pilots in general. The flight attendant courageously did the right thing.
@Jake,
Like Dan said earlier the 2 jobs are not like each other at all…. Except for the act of manually handling a large piece of equipment. I would indeed agree driving a bus through NYC would be far more challenging, but comparably the physical handling of a plane is probably less than 5% of a modern pilots’ duties. Like Dan said the job of a pilot is more akin to a nautical captain than a bus driver….I don’t know why you are so fixated on driving home your opinion that pilots deserve less respect than bus driver, disregarding they are entrusted with many more lives, undergo much more extensive training and are responsible for the safe operation of sometimes 100s of millions of dollars of equipment. Thats precisely what makes this story so unforgivable. That’s not to say that bus drivers are not sometimes under appreciated and don’t have a challenging job. But come on man!
@Steven
There is no 8 hr snorting cocaine to throttle rule. And your 8 hr rule is an FAA rule, in the rest of the world it’s usually 12 and .02 BAC. This guy was a moron and deserves all he has coming his way!
@ CecilO – I didn’t say they deserve less respect, only that pilots get much more deference than commensurate with who they are and the job that they actually perform. They are average people with average capabilities, who should not be given outsized authority/discretion/trust/deference. They should be questioned when wanting to kick off passengers, turn a flight around, etc. And they should be closely monitored to make sure they’re prepared for a flight – drug/alcohol test before every flight, for example, like you would with any average person about to be responsible for the welfare of hundreds. As for the ship captain analogy – ships sail for months and someone needs to be the king. Planes fly for hours, no kings are needed. By the way, bus drivers also take hundreds of lives in their hands every day.
Was she hot? No photos?
If I had a “business” trip like that, I’d be bragging too. Actually I have, just too far and in between and too long ago. (singsong) Those were the days…