OUT OF THE BLUE
Crew member integrity after the America West incident
By Elliott Hester

Several months ago, while walking toward the boarding gate with members of my airline crew, our captain was approached by a passenger who asked if he'd been drinking alcohol. The query was met with candid incredulity by every member of the crew. Our captain was as sober as a corpse. (I've never flown with one who wasn't.) In a clipped voice, he informed the passenger of this fact and then marched toward the airplane, shaking his head.

After a recent alcohol-related incident involving two America West pilots, however, our captain may find himself shaking his head more often. Earlier this month, Capt. Thomas Cloyd and First Officer Christopher Hughes were arrested, stripped of their licenses and terminated for suspicion of trying to fly a plane while intoxicated.

A security screener claimed to have smelled alcohol on their breath as the two pilots cleared the checkpoint at Miami International Airport. By the time authorities responded, the America West plane had already pushed back from the gate. But air traffic controllers ordered the plane to return to the gate. The pilots were then tested for alcohol.

According to Associated Press reports, both Cloyd and Hughes had blood-alcohol levels above the legal limit of 0.08. They were charged with operating an aircraft under the influence and operating a motor vehicle under the influence. If convicted, the pilots could face five years in prison. If convicted, they won't receive a modicum of sympathy from the passengers and crew whose lives were endangered.

Airline crew members are subject to random drug and alcohol tests at the completion of every trip sequence, not at the outset. But in the wake of the America West fiasco, passengers may begin to question the logic in this order. Mandated by the Department of Transportation and implemented by every U.S. airline, compulsory testing has been the focus of debate for many years. Some call it an invasion of privacy. Others believe it to be a good thing. But regardless of where we stand, testing is a procedure that most employees have gotten used to.

In all my years of flying, I've never been subjected to a sobriety test. But I've been tested for drugs on numerous occasions. (This discrepancy speaks volumes about our failure to address the most common form of substance abuse). I remember my last drug test as if it were yesterday. As was the case with the America West crew, but under entirely different circumstances, my test was conducted at Miami International Airport.

After our inbound aircraft docked at the arrival gate, passengers began filing through the forward exit door. I grabbed my crew bag and followed behind them, happy to be home after a routine three-day trip. A supervisor was standing on the lip of the jet bridge, however. She held in her hand a urinalysis order with my name on it.

I followed the supervisor down the jet bridge, up an escalator, into a concourse, along a moving walkway, through the airline crew immigration checkpoint, down an escalator, past a gauntlet of customs officials, through a set of automatic doors, up another escalator, into another concourse, through an unmarked door, down one of those dark and dreary airport corridors that passengers never see, and then stepped into my airline’s medical facility. There, I was met by the unsmiling face of a health-care professional. She proffered a plastic cup and told me to get down to business.

In a crisp stentorian voice, the health-care professional told me that a proper level of urine was necessary to achieve adequate test results. If I failed to fill the cup to a mark approximately two-thirds up, the sample would be negated and I would be banished to a chair, watched like a hawk and told to drink, drink, drink until my bladder swelled and a more appropriate level of urine could be extracted. I've heard stories about employees forced to wait for hours because their internal plumbing failed to produce. Fortunately for me, my bladder was ready to cooperate.

The restroom was not a functional one. There was no running water in the sink; the toilet bowl held blue liquid instead of clear water. Later, I learned that these measures prevent less scrupulous employees from diluting their urine with water (this helps mask illegal drugs). In one of those paranoid moments that we are prepared for by too many "X-Files" episodes, I felt as if I were being watched. I unzipped my pants anyway, heckled by the ghosts of those who'd aimed and missed before me.

Once the cup was filled, I exited the bathroom and presented my urine sample to the health-care professional. What happened next seemed a bit excessive, but considering the cargo I suppose such measures were necessary. She double-sealed the container, placed it inside one-half of a plastic foam mold, covered that half with the other half, wrapped both halves together using a mummy-like application of "caution" tape, put the taped mold in a box and put the box in a file cabinet filled with other samples to be picked up by a Federal Express courier later that night.

The following day, a different Fed Ex courier would deliver hundreds of similar plastic foam containers–a collection of samples from airline crew bases across the country–to a testing center. My stuff tested negative. The overwhelming majority of crew members test negative on an ongoing bases. All it took was two wayward pilots to damage the integrity of an entire industry.