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MOSCOW - Spending 10 hours aboard a plane is never a particularly fun prospect, but it becomes downright terrifying when the pilot appears to be so drunk that he can't speak properly.
It has emerged that passengers aboard an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to New York were greeted by a welcome announcement from pilot Alexander Cheplevsky that was so garbled it was impossible to tell what language he was speaking.
They became so scared that a group of passengers demanded to see the man at the controls to check whether or not he was drunk. Cheplevsky refused to leave the cockpit to reassure the passengers, who were told by the crew they should either stop complaining or get off the plane.
The Moscow Times, which had a reporter on board, claimed that an Aeroflot representative boarded the aircraft and told the passengers it wasn't a big deal if the pilot was drunk.
"Really, all he has to do is press a button and the plane flies itself," the representative allegedly said. "The worst that could happen is he'll trip over something in the cockpit."
Unsurprisingly, this did not reassure the passengers, but the crew simply told them to "stop making trouble". The incident, on December 28, was only resolved with the help of Ksenia Sobchak, a television presenter, who happened to be on the plane. She made a few phone calls and after a delay of several hours, the pilots were replaced and flight 315 took off.
The newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that Cheplevsky had been celebrating his birthday the night before, but the airline denied he was drunk. A spokeswoman for Aeroflot, Irina Dannenberg, accused the passengers of "mass psychosis" and said the airline would sue Sobchak. The airline later issued a statement claiming the pilot may have suffered a stroke before takeoff.
"I don't think there's anyone in Russia who doesn't know what a drunk person looks like," a passenger, Katya Kushner, told the Moscow Times. "At first, he was looking at us like we were crazy. Then, when we wouldn't back down, he said, 'I'll sit here quietly in a corner. We have three more pilots. I won't even touch the controls, I promise."'
Stewardesses on many Russian airlines turn a blind eye to the consumption of duty free alcohol on board. In one incident in mid-2007, a flight travelling to Turkey from St Petersburg had to turn back after a drunken brawl broke out. Last northern autumn, special forces were put on high alert in St Petersburg after a Russian man in a drunken prank on a Turkish Airlines flight to the city said he was hijacking the plane.
The airline is already reeling from a crash last September of an internal flight run by its subsidiary airline, Aeroflot-Nord. All 88 people on board were killed when the plane burst into flames while making a second attempt to land in bad weather conditions.
A report said alcohol was found in the muscle tissue of pilot Rodion Medvedev. Recordings reveal that Medvedev, handed over the controls to his co-pilot, saying: "You see yourself that I can't [land]."
- INDEPENDENT
