Japan Airlines has banned its entire workforce of more than 6,000 flight attendants from drinking alcohol during all work layovers as the Tokyo-based carrier reels from yet another scandal involving a crew member who failed a breathalyzer test just moments before she was due to start work.
The latest incident occurred on May 23, when the chief flight attendant, often known as the purser, was due to operate an early morning return flight to Tokyo from Hiroshima, having spent the evening in the city, located in the southwest of Japan.
According to airline sources cited by the Japanese language site ‘Aviation Wire,’ the long-serving flight attendant had been working for Japan Airlines since 1992 and had only recently been promoted to the chief flight attendant position.
On her crew was a flight attendant whom she had trained with, and following the outbound flight to Hiroshima, the pair decided to meet up in the hotel bar for a few drinks in order to catch up.
The pair began drinking at around 5:30 pm on May 22, just over an hour before a strict 12-hour no-drinking policy kicked in. Rather than adhering to this deadline, however, the two flight attendants continued drinking.
The chief flight attendant ended up drinking two beers and two small glasses of white wine, with the last drink being served at around 7:15 pm. In the end, the pair retired to their rooms at around 9:25 pm ahead of a 6:20 am pickup from the hotel the following morning.
Following a series of alcohol scandals that have rocked Japan Airlines, pilots and flight attendants are now required to administer a self-test breathalyzer before they report to work. The test must register zero alcohol in their breath for them to be deemed fit to fly.
The chief flight attendant admitted that when she administered her self-test breathalyzer at 5:45 am, it registered a reading of 0.23 milligrams of alcohol. However, she believed that by the time she arrived at the airport, this would no longer be an issue.
The crew arrived at the airport just 20 minutes later, where flight attendants are subject to a second pre-work breathalyzer test. At this point, the chief flight attendant registered a reading of 0.11 milligrams.
The airline allowed the crew member to re-test, but the same reading was returned on several attempts. As a result, she was removed from duty as she was deemed unfit to operate due to alcohol.
Her coworker, whom she had been drinking with, had already reported unfit to work the flight home, so that now meant there were two fewer crew than rostered for the flight, and the service had to be delayed as Japan Airlines scrambled to find replacement flight attendants.
In the end, the flight ended up taking off just 40 minutes late, but the incident was enough to warrant a full press conference on Wednesday, where company officials issued a grovelling apology and promised to stop future incidents from occurring.
How do Japan Airlines’ alcohol rules compare to those of other countries?
Generally speaking, alcohol rules are set by the local regulatory aviation authority of a country and not by individual airlines. When foreign crews have a layover in another country, they are subject to the alcohol rules of their destination country and not their home country:
- The United States: No alcohol within eight hours of reporting for duty (known as the ‘bottle to throttle’ rule). An alcohol concentration of 0.04 or greater in a blood or breath specimen is deemed unfit.
- The United Kingdom: No alcohol within eight hours of reporting for duty. 9 micrograms per 100 millilitres of breath or more is deemed unfit.
- Australia: An alcohol concentration of 0.04 or greater in a blood or breath specimen is deemed unfit.
- The Netherlands: No alcohol within 10 hours of reporting for duty. An alcohol concentration of 0.02 or greater in a blood or breath specimen is deemed unfit.
The Netherlands is mentioned here because Dutch authorities regularly carry out breath tests of foreign crews departing Amsterdam, and flight attendants are often caught out. For breaches just over the limit, crew members are removed from the flight but are issued an on-the-spot fine rather than being arrested.
Japan Airlines is already the subject of an audit by the country’s transport ministry due to several recent alcohol incidents involving crew members, including an incident in April 2024, when a flight from Dallas Fort Worth to Tokyo Haneda had to be cancelled when the Captain became drunk and rowdy in the crew layover hotel.
There have also been several other incidents, although the catalyst for regulatory scrutiny was the imprisonment of a Japan Airlines First Officer in the UK after he failed a police breathalyser test at London Heathrow Airport in 2018.
The pilot is said to have cheated a pre-flight alcohol test at the company’s offices at Heathrow before he briefly boarded the Tokyo-bound plane. Suspicious staff, however, called in the police, who promptly arrested the pilot after carrying out their own field alcohol test.
After his arrest, the pilot admitted to having drunk two bottles of wine and over a litre and a half of beer the night before he was due to work. He was sentenced to 10 months in prison.
It appears that the chief flight attendant in this latest incident had also tried to cheat the self-test system by not registering her results on an internal company app.
Other crew members had urged her to register her results before the crew bus to the airport left the hotel, but they apparently deferred to her authority when she failed to complete the necessary paperwork.
Now, Japan Airlines has instigated a full ban on flight attendants drinking alcohol during all work layovers for the foreseeable future.
In the aftermath of the Heathrow incident, Japan Airlines also called on its entire workforce of more than 32,000 employees to abstain from alcohol for the remainder of the year.
