The President of Japan Airlines will take a pay cut of 30% for two months as part of the carrier’s response to an alcohol controversy after a flight attendant was caught attempting to work on a flight while still slightly over the permitted alcohol limit for aircrew.
Mitsuko Tottori, along with the rest of the Japan Airlines board of directors face ‘punitive measures’ over the debacle. Japan’s Ministry of Transport has ordered the airline to file a report on how it intends to prevent a recurrence by July 17.
The incident occurred on May 23 when the chief flight attendant, who was spending an overnight layover in Hiroshima, following a domestic flight from Tokyo, met up with another crew member in the hotel bar for a few drinks.
Japan Airlines imposes a strict 12-hour curfew on drinking alcohol before operating a flight, and in this case, this would have meant the pair would have had to stop drinking at 6:30 pm.
After meeting at 5:30 pm, just an hour before the curfew, the chief flight attendant didn’t end up ordering her last drink until 7:15 pm. In the end, she drank two beers and two small glasses of white wine before retiring to her room at around 9:25 pm.
Following previous alcohol-related controversies that have engulfed the airline, Japan Airlines now requires all of its pilots to perform a breath alcohol test on personally issued devices before they even report for work.
The chief flight attendant performed the first test in her hotel room at 5:45 am the following morning, and it registered a reading of 0.23 milligrams of alcohol – over the airline’s strict limit.
She was meant to submit the rest result to the company, but she put this off, hoping that by the time she got to the airport, where a second test is performed, her alcohol level would no longer be an issue. This breath test recorded a result of 0.11 milligrams of alcohol, which is still over the limit.
The flight attendant was stood down, and a replacement crew member had to be found, with the flight taking off around 40 minutes later than scheduled.
The Ministry of Transport says that its preliminary investigation into the incident has raised doubts over Japan Airlines’ safety management system, as the flight attendant was able to dodge the preliminary test in her hotel room without the airline being aware.
In the immediate aftermath of this incident, Japan Airlines imposed a strict no-alcohol policy for flight attendants on layovers, although this rule doesn’t apply to crew members when they are at home. As a result, in theory, it might still be possible for a flight attendant to cheat the at-home test without changes.
Japan Airlines has been subject to intense scrutiny by the Ministry of Transport following several alcohol scandals in recent years.
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.
In another incident, Japan Airlines was forced to cancel a flight from Dallas Fort Worth to Tokyo Haneda in April 2024, when the Captain became drunk and rowdy in the crew’s layover hotel lobby.
