Passengers were ready to board a Delta Air Lines flight out of Sweden’s Stockholm Arlanda Airport (ARN) when one of their pilots was led away by local authorities.
The pilot had reportedly failed a random breathalyzer test administered on the crew by local police. It’s not clear if the pilot was drunk, just that the breathalyzer showed her blood alcohol level was over the European Union’s 0.02 percent legal limit for airline pilots.
The EU’s limit is half the acceptable level for airline pilots in the United States, who are allowed a blood-alcohol level of 0.04 percent, according to the FAA. For reference, the legal limit for drivers in the U.S. is 0.08 percent.
Of course, the gold standard of aviation safety around the world is for pilots to have no trace of alcohol in their system when stepping into the cockpit. The FAA advises pilots in the U.S. to wait at least eight hours “from bottle to throttle,” to be sure any alcohol completely leaves their system before they take the helm. “A more conservative approach is to wait 24 hours from the last use of alcohol before flying,” the FAA says. “This is especially true if intoxication occurred.”
Delta flight 205 was scheduled to take off from Stockholm at 10:20 a.m. local time on Tuesday, July 22, and police boarded the plane about an hour before departure, according to aviation blog One Mile at a Time. After police led the Delta pilot away, the flight was canceled.
Random breathalyzer tests for both pilots and flight attendants are standard across the airline industry. Crew can also be tested if there’s a reasonable suspicion they might be over the limit.
In a statement to The Independent, the airline said that there was “no pilot intoxication” and that she had been released from custody. “We continue to work with authorities to review what occurred,” said the statement. TravelPulse reached out to Delta for more information but didn’t hear back by the time of publication.
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