A friend told us about this amusing/frightening story broadcast yesterday on Canada's CBC radio show "As It Happens," relating an incident of a clearly intoxicated Russian pilot being confronted by passengers on a transatlantic Aeroflot flight meant to leave from Moscow (there's also a piece over at MT). The illuminating part of the story? How the passengers are scolded by the airline for making such a big deal out of the situation. Mark this one down for low moments in Russian customer service...
From the CBC:
Dateline - Moscow....
Clause number one of any Airline Passengers bill of rights, you might think, would be .. ... nyet to drunk pilots.
But it appears no such clause exists in Moscow.
According to details revealed this week, passengers on board a recent New York-bound Aeroflot flight were somewhat startled by the intercom greeting from Captain Alexander Cheplevsky.
His "Welcome aboard," spoken in Russian, was barely intelligible. When he switched to English, the slurring was worse. In fact, passengers told The Moscow Times they couldn't tell, really, what language their pilot was speaking. If any.
Someone called Aeroflot head office to complain. At first, passengers were told to "stop making trouble." Then, airline staff boarded the plane to try to calm them down. According to eyewitnesses, one offered this reassuring reassurance: "It's not such a big deal if the pilot is drunk. The plane practically flies itself."
For half an hour, Captain Cheplevsky refused the passengers' demands that he leave the cockpit and show himself. When the good captain did emerge, his eyes were bloodshot and his stance more than a touch wobbly. Once he realized he wasn't convincing anyone he was sober, the captain offered a compromise: "I'll sit quietly in a corner," he reportedly said. "We have three more pilots. I won't even touch the controls, I promise."
In the end, passengers succeeded in getting all the pilots replaced. The plane was three hours late, but while they were waiting the passengers kept themselves busy signing a declaration that the pilot was inebriated.
An Aeroflot spokeswoman said later that tests revealed no trace of alcohol in the pilot's blood. She said the passengers suffered from "mass psychosis."
But perhaps there's a more comforting reason for what the passengers observed. According to a company statement issued even later, it might have been that Captain Cheplevsky had suffered a stroke just before the flight. Now, I wonder what a Passenger Bill of Rights would say about THAT.
