Drinking and flying

Midwest Airlines today is defending a pilot who was arrested in his cockpit at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport last week when someone smelled alcohol on his breath. KSTP reported that is blood alcohol level was .16. It wasn’t. It was .016. That’s not drunk, and it’s not against the law to have a .016 blood alcohol level, as long as you didn’t do any of the drinking it in the previous 8 hours. And the airline says the pilot was within the airline’s more stringent regulations of 10 hours “between bottle and throttle.”

So how many beers, for example, do you have to drink in order to register .016 10 hours from now?

According to this calculator, about 6. Or about the same as a half-bottle of beer within the last hour.

Comments are closed.