Flight delayed 6 hours for crew drug tests

jimntx

Veteran
Jun 28, 2003
11,218
3,302
Dallas, TX
www.usaviation.com
Got this from a friend just now. I think it was originally from the Des Moines Register. Hope the passenger is proud of himself.

A U.S. Airways passenger's joke about the flight's crew having been up all night partying delayed the flight for several hours as the entire crew was consequently drug tested.
The flight scheduled for departure at 9am from Des Moines, Iowa was already two hours behind when its passengers were told the delay was over the crew’s previous flight coming in late the night before.
Boarding around 11am, passenger Glen Clark of Waterloo overheard another man ask the crew if the delay was because they had partied too hard.

'He said it jokingly,' Mr Clark told the Des Moines Register, 'and I didn't really think much of it, personally.'
He added that other passengers around him laughed at the suggestion.
Once seated, however, the pilot came on the loud speaker saying the crew would be taking a drug test, because of what had been said.

‘It was a bad experience for us today,’ Mr Clark said once it was all over.
After an hour and a half wait, while the drug tests were administered to the crew, an inquiring passenger rose up to the pilot, asking for an explanation.
'It's one of these things where if someone makes a comment, makes an accusation ... God forbid something happened,' he said according to passenger Jim McClelland who recorded their conversation and presented it to WHO-TV.
'Everybody in the station is fairly insistent about it. My thought is, "Come up here and smell my breath." If we have problems, [we`ll] get off. Otherwise, we're going,' the pilot said.
Airline spokeswoman Tina Swail confirmed the original delay over the crew's previous flight arriving late the night before.
As per the crew’s rest contract, they required a two-hour delay.
Six hours after their originally scheduled flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, at 1pm the plane finally took off.
Mr Clark said once they had all re-boarded, the passenger who made the joke, wasn't let back on.
He said he saw the man seated outside the gate while he and his wife boarded with the rest of the other passengers.
Swail says the airline takes any accusation like this very seriously.
All of the crew members passed the drug test.
 
I would really like to see fines levelled against passengers that do this or the bomb jokes, in almost all causes nothing happens to them. It cost the airlines 10s of thousands per incident that gets passed on to consumers not the idiots acting stupid.
 
I would really like to see fines levelled against passengers that do this or the bomb jokes, in almost all causes nothing happens to them. It cost the airlines 10s of thousands per incident that gets passed on to consumers not the idiots acting stupid.

Sadly that is the way of america now. Just search "idiots" on youtube and you will get a nice selection of hospital trips that we all now have to help pay for.
 
NO Emergency Room in the USA can turn away a patient.
Federal law = EMTALA = big penalties if ER does so.
MANY are aware of this fact and the huge hospital expense incurred is passed along to any who will later pay or those insured.
An ER cannot demand any form of payment / phone # / address prior to treatment .
Hence the abuse.
Not sure how the new Obama plan will affect this long past practice.

FA
 
You were already paying for the idiots who were uninsured. They go to tax-supported (by you) city or county hospitals.

Yes I am aware of that. My original post never said anything to the contrary.

Just like I (and you) have been paying for the turd down the street that has been out of work for a year and not bothering to look for work because "Hey they now pay for 99 weeks! Why should I?" Actual quote said with a big grin on his tubby face.

You do have some good ones though, another neighbor was laid off after 12 years with a company but took the first job he could find to keep income coming in. The pay was about the same as what he would have got from unemployment but he still worked it for 6 months before he found a new job that was in his field.

Current events is just another cog in the long line of people being rewarded for sitting on their butt instead of trying to better themselves.
 
Yes, and once you couldn't say Hi to your friend named Jack. Why didn't the geniuses who take such stupid accusations seriously, check when the crew arrived the night before?
 
Yes, and once you couldn't say Hi to your friend named Jack. Why didn't the geniuses who take such stupid accusations seriously, check when the crew arrived the night before?

Agreed, but then again you know how some of the stations are now. Had some goober complain to ops about us being 5 mins late because we stopped for coffee on the way to the gate........the coffee was from the hotel and the 6 am hotel van left the hotel at 6:15. A/C pushed on time but Mr. Goober the station manager still tried to get the crew in trouble. Not that it got him anywhere...but he still tried.