LONDON: A Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) pilot was jailed for nine months in Britain on Friday for being drunk before he was due to fly a plane with 156 people on board.
Irfan Faiz, 55, was asked to leave the cockpit during checks for the flight from Leeds Bradford airport to Islamabad on September 18 because he smelled of alcohol and was unsteady on his feet.
The father-of-two was found to have three times the legal amount of alcohol in his blood, prosecutors told the court in Leeds in northern England.
Faiz told police he had drunk three-quarters of a bottle of whisky but had stopped drinking at about 3:00 am, some 19 hours ahead of the planned take-off of the Airbus 310.
His behavior would have been permitted in Pakistan, where the rules state only that there should be 12 hours between “bottle and throttle” no matter how much the pilot had drunk, the court was told.
Judge Peter Coulson described this rule as “extraordinary” and said he was also “astonished” to hear that pilots regularly flying out of Britain did not know about the far stricter regulations there.
In Britain, pilots are permitted nine micrograms in 100 millilitres of breath tested, well below the 35 micrograms allowed to drive a car. Faiz initially gave a reading of 41 but a later test recorded 28.
At the time of the incident, PIA, which is Pakistan’s national carrier, said Faiz would be sacked if he was convicted.
