Thread: Don't worry about illusory drunk angry Russian pilots; planes fly themselves!

"The first thought that occurred to me was, 'This guy is drunk,'" said Khatuna Kobiashvili, a passenger on the Moscow-New York flight. "His speech was so slurred it was hard to tell what language he was speaking."

As passengers, including a Moscow Times reporter, related their concerns to the flight crew, they were told to "stop making trouble" or get off the Boeing 767 jet. A passenger who called Aeroflot's head office received a similar rebuff.

"They told me that it was impossible for a pilot to be drunk and hung up the phone," said the passenger, Tatyana Vorontsova.

After a chaotic hour during which passengers pleaded with flight attendants, crew and several Aeroflot representatives who boarded the plane, unexpected help came from socialite and TV host Ksenia Sobchak, who was also on the plane, and all four pilots were replaced.

At the same time, an Aeroflot representative sought to assure them that "it's not such a big deal if the pilot is drunk."

"Really, all he has to do is press a button and the plane flies itself," the representative said. "The worst that could happen is he'll trip over something in the cockpit."

Immediately after the incident, Dannenberg told Komsomolskaya Pravda that the pilots were removed from the plane because of "mass psychosis" among the passengers. In the same interview, Dannenberg said Aeroflot would sue Sobchak if the costs of delaying the flight were "very large."

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/article/600/42/374157.htm

More recently (literally hours ago), a September 14th Aeroflot crash that killed 88 people was blamed on "alcohol and pilot confusion," with "an unspecified amount of alcohol was detected in the pilot's body."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...5Bw-AD968RNDG1