HEATHROW PILOT NINE TIMES ALCOHOL LIMIT
Drunk first officer held minutes before 244-passenger jet was due to take off
A DRUNK pilot was arrested as he prepared to fly a passenger jet out of Heathrow.
Katsutoshi Jitsukawa, 42, was nine times the limit. It is said he had two bottles of wine and five cans of beer the night before.
A crew bus driver reported him for smelling of booze.
A DRUNK pilot was stopped from flying a passenger jet out of Heathrow after a fellow worker told police he smelt of booze.
Katsutoshi Jitsukawa was nine times the legal limit, it was revealed yesterday. A crew bus driver is said to have spotted he was drunk and officers held him minutes before take-off.
The 42-year-old first officer had reportedly guzzled two bottles of wine and five cans of beer the night before. He had 189mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood in his system. The limit for pilots is 20mg. Jitsukawa, who was due to fly the Japan Airlines flight to Tokyo on Sunday, appeared before magistrates in Uxbridge, West London, yesterday. He admitted exceeding the alcohol limit. The Met said: “He has been remanded in custody to appear at Isleworth crown court on November 29 for sentencing.”
In June, British Airways pilot Julian Monaghan was jailed for eight months for being more than four times the limit as he was due to fly from Gatwick.
A PASSENGER jet carrying up to 126 people came within 50ft of colliding with a drone over London.
The Airbus A319 was doing 250mph at 1,300ft as it came in to land at Heathrow when the drone passed beneath it over the Richmond area, in the south-west of the capital.
The UK Airprox Board rated the June 17 near-miss, involving a Swiss International Air Lines flight from Zurich, as Category A – meaning there was a serious risk of collision.
The plane’s crew said they saw the drone “just below their flight path, on the extended centreline” four miles east of Heathrow. The report said: “It was close enough to see it was white, had four propellers and blinking filaments.”
The drone was being flown illegally at more than three times the permitted maximum height of 400ft. The operator could have faced five years in prison for endangering an aircraft but was apparently never traced.
An airline spokesman said: “I can confirm there was an approach of a
drone on the mentioned date but this did not require an evasion manoeuvre.”
It is the latest scare to emerge in a series of close calls between airliners and drones in our air space. Last month, a report by the UKAB revealed a Virgin Atlantic jet on the same flight path came within 10ft of hitting a drone near Clapham Common on June 25.
It was reported in March that nearmisses involving drones have tripled in the past two years, with 92 reported last year, up from 29 in 2015.
And a recent study found a mid-air collision with a 4lb drone could “critically damage” a plane’s windscreen.