BRITAIN: In Britain a Finnish airline captain has been jailed for six months after he was caught preparing to fly a packed holiday jet while drunk.
Heikki Tallila (51) was almost 2½ times over the legal alcohol limit for a pilot when he was arrested in the cockpit of a Boeing 757 last August 23rd, Manchester's Crown Court heard yesterday.
The pilot was finishing pre-flight checks when the authorities boarded the aircraft, which had 225 holidaymakers, minutes before take-off.
He is the first to be sentenced under legislation introduced last March in Britain, which gives police powers to breathalyse pilots and cabin crew suspected of attempting to fly under the influence of alcohol.
Judge John Burke QC said Tallila had a responsibility to ensure the safety of his passengers.
The court was told he was arrested at about 7.20 a.m. on the tarmac of Manchester airport while in charge of the Finnair Boeing 757 flight. He had drunk up to seven glasses of wine and a glass of beer on the afternoon before he was arrested.
Tallila was escorted off the plane and breathalysed in the terminal building before being taken to Stretford police station where a blood test was taken.
He was found to have 49 mg of alcohol per 100 ml of blood. The legal limit for a pilot is 20 mg - for a driver it is 80 mg.
The court heard that since his arrest Tallila had been sacked from his £100,000-a-year job as a pilot with Finnair, where he had worked for 25 years.
Finnair had chartered the plane from Air Scandic. Passengers who had been due to fly to Dalaman in Turkey were delayed for more than six hours while a replacement captain was found.