False DUI Arrests and the FAA

Gotta say, historically when I deployed as a carrier pilot, I had about a 1 percent chance of not coming home.

Asking for better than 98% really isn’t that high of a bar…

Relative to the bad dream thread… it wasn’t a dream, I always had a bad feeling out looking out the bearing line on the left in the tanker pattern, seeing the belly of a F-18 and then nothing…. That was at a 99 percent chance. 98 is twice as bad… oooph….

With your entire career on the line, 98 sucks. Bad.

Now, we both had a 50 percent chance of getting killed when we had our engine out experiences… but did that statistic really apply to us? Prolly not.

So, ya, it’s whining. Granted. But if ANY group is gonna whine about it, it should be pilots because the FAA’s draconian and corrupt practices make that 2 percent (not likely) have DIRE consequences, making it a operational risk management nightmare.
 
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Tools said:
So, ya, it’s whining. Granted. But if ANY group is gonna whine about it, it should be pilots because the FAA’s draconian and corrupt practices make that 2 percent (not likely) have DIRE consequences, making it a operational risk management nightmare.
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For the record, none of my comments have been directed at you in any way. I respect your point of view and agree fully that FAA enforcement should follow the civil evidence.
 
Ed Haywood said:
We are in general agreement. Law enforcement in a free society always has to balance rights with effectiveness. I do not deny that bureaucratic overreach happens, especially in the FAA.

But let's go back to the good old days as you suggest. The 80's were when American society decided we had enough and something had to be done. Stricter laws and more aggressive enforcement was the solution. The numbers since then tell the story:


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This data comparison is not entirely valid. A big part of the reduction in fatalities from seat belt use, airbags and vehicle design. You would need to find the number of DUI accidents, both fatal and non-fatal, to make a proper comparison. Finding the valid non-fatal tally isn't simple.
 
Jeff Oslick said:
This data comparison is not entirely valid. A big part of the reduction in fatalities from seat belt use, airbags and vehicle design. You would need to find the number of DUI accidents, both fatal and non-fatal, to make a proper comparison. Finding the valid non-fatal tally isn't simple.
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Not really. The data is there. Alcohol-related fatalities have declined as a percentage of total fatalities.

motor-vehicle-deaths.webp
 
Tools said:
Asking for better than 98% really isn’t that high of a bar…
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You may misunderstand what that 98% represents. An arrest is based on probable cause. No one has ever claimed or suggested that actual guilt is the standard for arrest, and that would be absurd.

So this means that 98% of drivers who troopers said were "probably impaired" based on observation of their driving and possible FST, were, in fact, empirically proved to be legally impaired. That's damn good! Especially when you consider that some additionally percentage were legally impaired despite not having the presumptive BAC.

That's more analogous to making a perfect landing 98% of the time.
 
TCABM said:
I am not picking on you specifically, but I’ve seen a lot of very similar statements made lately. Unfortunately, laws are what they are, not what we want them to be. Fortunately, there is also a process to change those laws.

Now I haven’t looked at the underlying statutes being bandied about here, so I won’t opine on what’s silly or not. Generally though, probable cause is not required for any detention (a traffic stop is a detention). Reasonable suspicion is all that’s required for a detention. During the detention, if enough sufficient, reliable facts and the circumstances are gathered by the officer, probable cause can be established by the officer and a warrantless arrest can be made.

It’s with that knowledge I will refer to what is first written (statute), then look at what’s been said (case law) in forming my opinion.

I’m also cynical enough to accept abuses occur and can’t be prevented as case law opens up just enough room that law enforcement can get a Mack truck thru.
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Reasonable articulable suspicion is required to detain for a time deemed reasonable to investigate the crime they have reasonable articulable suspicion of.

Within that reasonable time frame, they must be able to elevate reasonable articulable suspicion to probable cause.
 
Ed Haywood said:
For the record, none of my comments have been directed at you in any way. I respect your point of view and agree fully that FAA enforcement should follow the civil evidence.
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You just dislike me for whatever reason, even though I'm fighting the exact same fight Tools is (he's actually a good friend of mine).
 
How is it that medical records are held from someone for so long?
I recall hospital routine BAC coming back quickly (hours to days).
Who does the blood draws that doesn’t disclose results?
 
4RNB said:
How is it that medical records are held from someone for so long?
I recall hospital routine BAC coming back quickly (hours to days).
Who does the blood draws that doesn’t disclose results?
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It isn’t that. They don’t go to hospitals for this. They have a phlebotomist on site at the jail. They do the specimen collection there and send it off to a lab.

Law enforcement agencies are getting away from breathalyzers and only offering blood tests. This creates a backlog at the lab, thus a long delay before the lab can even return a result.
 
Ed Haywood said:
Your rights are protected by the legal system. An arrest is not a conviction. Stop whining about it.
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The FAA doesn't see it that way.

How many lives is it OK to destroy while hiding behind "safety" as an excuse for hyper-authoritarian police state actions?
 
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Lindberg said:
Still waiting to hear about some of the many pilots whose lives have been ruined by having a 0.0 BAC.
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This… if we assume 1.4MM people arrested for DUI annually, and 0.14% are pilots with medical certificates (both those numbers from Google’ AI bot, so they must be true, right?), and 2% of those arrests are bogus, that would be roughly 39-40 pilots wrongly charged per year. You’d think we’d hear about a couple hundred of those over the last 5 years, wouldn’t you?
 
Lindberg said:
Still waiting to hear about some of the many pilots whose lives have been ruined by having a 0.0 BAC.
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Because you dismiss anything that hasn’t yet resulted in what it has the potential to result in. I have never claimed that it has resulted in pilots being grounded for sober DUI, but I see great potential for it to. That should be enough to raise concern dude.

For all we know, it very well may have grounded some pilots, but hasn’t yet been reported to the public domain.

Normalization of risk/deviance is a very hazardous attitude.

If it can happen to non-pilots (and it has happened to many…don’t ask me who because even if I gave you the data, you’d look at it with dismissive bias anyway), it can happen to pilots.
 
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Lindberg said:
Still waiting to hear about some of the many pilots whose lives have been ruined by having a 0.0 BAC.
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How about those would have been pilots, but spit the bit at the prospect of spending tens of thousands of dollars fighting for a medical certificate they would surely have been denied at the outset for no good reason. The prospective professional pilots found other jobs; the recreational pilots lkely said "Eff this noise, I'll buy a boat or a motorcycle."

Just because you won't find any of those folks palling around on PoA or at your local airport, doesn't mean they don't exist.
 
Jon Wilder said:
Wrong. This is what is known as “normalization of risk” and “normalization of deviance” (it’s wrong but it’s acceptable because pilots have yet to suffer negative consequences). The lack of a negative outcome for pilots doesn’t mean it won’t happen. That’s been my point this entire time. Why wait until it happens, or until it happens to some arbitrary number or percentage of pilots before we take action? Why are you wired to think this way?
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I do believe you've utterly misunderstood my point. (As I'm supporting your position)
 
DJTorrente said:
How about those would have been pilots, but spit the bit at the prospect of spending tens of thousands of dollars fighting for a medical certificate they would surely have been denied at the outset for no good reason. The prospective professional pilots found other jobs; the recreational pilots lkely said "Eff this noise, I'll buy a boat or a motorcycle."

Just because you won't find any of those folks palling around on PoA or at your local airport, doesn't mean they don't exist.
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100% THIS!!!
 
Salty said:
The fact that you don’t know anybody it happened to is proof of precisely nothing. Terribly illogical argument.
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Yeah, ok.

Some are claiming this is a big problem. If it was a big problem, there'd be some evidence of that.

The fact that no one here knows anyone who's been killed by an asteroid while eating breakfast doesn't mean it's impossible, but it's evidence that there isn't a rash of breakfast asteroid deaths.

If you want to talk about things that could hypothetically be a problem, you should still explain how the hypothetical problem is going to cause the hypothetical bad thing. And if you're going to claim it's a big problem, you should be able to show that it's been a problem at least once......
 
DJTorrente said:
How about those would have been pilots, but spit the bit at the prospect of spending tens of thousands of dollars fighting for a medical certificate they would surely have been denied at the outset for no good reason.
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Why would someone who had DUI charges dismissed after testing showed 0.0 BAC need to spend thousands to get a medical?
 
So cannibalism is not a big problem because it hasn’t happened often? Just one example to show the flaw in your logic.
 
Lindberg said:
Why would someone who had DUI charges dismissed after testing showed 0.0 BAC need to spend thousands to get a medical?
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How do you know they would? Have you encountered, read about, or talked to someone who went through this? Do you know that simply telling the FAA "Testing showed 0.0 BAC, charges were dismissed" would still result in needing to spend thousands on whatever to get the medical?

I'm not saying it's never happened, nor that it would not be crappy if it did. I'm just thinking this is really more of a very unusual outlier than an actual "big problem". And yeah, I know, I'll feel that way until it happens to me, right?

Salty said:
So cannibalism is not a big problem because it hasn’t happened often? Just one example to show the flaw in your logic.
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I guess it would be a "big problem" if you were the one being served for dinner, but would you honestly say cannibalism is a "big problem" in the US?
 
Salty said:
So cannibalism is not a big problem because it hasn’t happened often? Just one example to show the flaw in your logic.
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Lol. I'm pretty sure you proved my point, but do tell me about all the cannibals running around eating people lately.
 
lol so it doesn’t matter unless it happens to you. That’s a sad and scary viewpoint.
 
DJTorrente said:
Because OKC said so. You disagree? Feel free to $eek redre$$ at your neare$t Federal Di$trict courthou$e.
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Oh 100%. I have one in my office sitting right next to me. Never pulled over, never arrested or convicted of anything. Just honest [naive] enough to disclose on medexpress he volunteered for an alcohol counseling program in conjuction with the sudden death of his 5 year old baby girl in a debris/projectile-related accident, on the joke that passes for public roadways in C and SW TX.

It never affected his military wings, active flyer through the whole thing, even mil sponsored for the counseling. *buzzer* FAA Deferred. That was mid 2023. Here we are in mid 2026, after tens of thousands of dollars in expenditures and almost 3 years, finally got his proverbial "repetitive AD hell" hamstrung-1st class. The money sink will continue.

Ironically, as a pro pilot, the only thing that saved him from spiraling into financial ruin was the military, who actually kept him flying and paid through the whole ordeal. If he had been a civilian pilot he'd be screwed; his household lacked the income diversification to float them (wife became non functional due to mental distress).

So good enough for a military class IIa (same/more responsibilities than an FAA class I, though the self-important at the FAA only honor it to a class-III); never arrested for anything, yet punished by the system just as he had been convicted of anything.

And he almost gave up too, on the specific basis of cost. As was already highlighted by others upthread, becomes another case of self-selection bias. Few remain in any space after they've thrown their hands up on an activity, then the incumbents get to use the absence of that voice as signal-boost for their own blind spot to the existence of these dynamics in the first place.

Lastly, you have to understand the problem with this venue is that you're speaking with a largely 10percenter crowd. A cohort who reflexively snickers at any notion of economic cost ever being considered punitive. Also take note, many of those who shrug shoulders about the non-existence of this problem do in fact have guaranteed income streams independent of having to hold an FAA class I to support their households. That matters when attempting to speak about injury. One of the reasons I'm diversifying my household income (largely disabusing me from the idea of wanting to rely on an FAA medical for primary payer) is precisely due to this economic warfare of threatening people's ability to cover their domestic expenses when they attempt to speak truth to power. Hiding behind the canard of "due process" while negating the notion of cost as a legitimate obstacle to said due process, is diabolical level of cognitive dissonance.
 
Lindberg said:
Why would someone who had DUI charges dismissed after testing showed 0.0 BAC need to spend thousands to get a medical?
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Why don't you ask the FAA that question?

Tools knows a guy who was a designated driver for his pilot buddies. Gets pulled over leaving the club. Refuses the preliminary breath test, is arrested, and elects to do a blood draw at the station. Comes back clean. Guess what? Ended up in HIMS anyway. Why? Because the FAA treats arrests as convictions regardless of the evidence.

It's a "big problem" for two reasons: (a) because it's a huge rights violation that is negatively impacting the lives and livelihoods of all sorts of people, and (b) if a pilot is put through this nonsense, they will have hell to pay with the FAA because of their grossly unfair stance on arrest vs conviction.
 
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Ed Haywood said:
Interesting that you are all about the bureaucratic risk to pilots, but not a word about the physical risk to everyone of failing to effectively enforce impaired driving laws.
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If you were actually operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated, then you should have the book thrown at you.

If you were stopped and found to be not impaired, however, and the stop/arrest was found to be a false arrest, you should be treated as such. None of this "Yeah well you were arrested for it so we're gonna punish you anyway" nonsense.
 
Salty said:
Nope. You just don’t seem to understand that you don’t have to wait for the bad thing to happen to you before you can call it a bad thing.
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Why do you keep misrepresenting what I wrote? You deny that it's a lack of understanding, so I have to assume it's intentional.
 
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