As much as we rely on flight crews for our safety, sometimes they need help themselves. A disturbing flight attendant incident aboard a recent British Airways flight highlights what happens when that trust is broken.
British Airways Flight Attendant Found Naked And Reportedly High On Meth Mid-Flight
On a West Coast to London flight, a British Airways flight attendant, who I will not name but had previously appeared in a BA safety video (he’s not the man pictured above), was discovered locked inside a lavatory, naked, incoherent, and under the influence of drugs. This was after he had already been removed from service on the flight for failing to assist with any pre-flight safety checks (begging the question, why he was allowed to travel in the first place).
After takeoff, he complained of cramps and retreated into a lavatory to change his clothes. There, he barricaded himself inside. Fellow crew members intervened, found him in an inebriated state, and reportedly had to nurse him to London (he had symptoms including dilated pupils and a high heart rate). Upon landing at Heathrow, police removed him. He has pleaded guilty to performing an aviation function while impaired by drugs (and also reportedly been charged with drug possession and indecent exposure) and has been terminated from British Airways. Witness reports say he admitted, “I’ve been a very naughty boy,” while exhibiting erratic behavior like sweating, mumbling, and failing to complete pre-flight duties.
Why Was He Allowed To Fly?
Not to be overdramatic, but this is a sobering breach of safety. Airlines have a duty to ensure anyone onboard can fulfill their responsibilities; in this case, the crew member himself became a potential hazard.
I’m going to assume that by removing him from service, there was still a minimum crew count necessary to operate the flight…otherwise, that’s a whole different issue. But when a cabin crew member goes AWOL on duty…isn’t that grounds for returning to the gate, just like an unruly passenger?
I understand that there may be an unspoken code of protecting one another amongst flight attendants, but this seems unacceptable to me if it comes at the cost of endangering passengers and other crew members. From what we know, it was clear this “party animal” flight attendant was unfit to fly and that was clear before takeoff.
CONCLUSION
We don’t need names, and we certainly don’t need sensationalism…this is someone’s personal crisis and I sincerely feel sorry for him and hope he gets the help he needs to overcome his drug issue. But it’s also a wake-up call for British Airways and other carriers: this sort of thing is not unheard of (in fact, it happened on another BA flight earlier this year, unless this was the same incident…) and the way it was handled raises more questions than answers.
> Read More: “He Was Dancing Naked In Business Class!” British Airways Flight Attendant Has Cocaine Meltdown
image: British Airways // hat tip: View From The Wing
“ We don’t need names”…..what???
How else is Aaron going to reach out to “help” him?
You need more professional help than this guy does, you obsessed Nazi nutjob.
Typical leftist, supporting those who kill Jews while calling those who support the Jewish people Nazi’s.
No wonder why the Democrats have record low support. Please keep it up Dylan Mulvaney!
Nah, you’re only supporting Jews because you hate certain other people more. And only support Jews in the most performative way possible, given some of the nasty coded comments you’ve made on here before (like Matthew once working for shekles…). Plus give your dusgusting hatred of racial and sexual minorities, not to mention your xenophobia, well, Nazi is a good term for you.
But hey whatever gets you ott, Adolf…
STFU Aaron.
Drop dead.
I see nothing wrong in ordering pre-employment and random toxicology screens thereafter. This is will encourage employees to step away from drug use before it becomes what we find here.
You may not see anything wrong, but the GDPR does. Random tests to ensure employees report for duty in a fit taste are one thing, monitoring their consumption of stuff while off duty, let alone before they have even signed a contract of employment, is quite another.
In the US this is not illegal and frequently used for persons for security clearances. Also many industries use it as well for safety purposes. No one wants an abuser working for them. I speak of full tox screening,
Yes, but this isn’t a US airline.
The US legal system basically doesn’t subscribe to the idea of giving individuals enhanced protection in their dealings with organisations. I’m all for free markets, but we do know that large companies have huge institutional advantages over individuals (be they consumers, employees, or whatever) which mean that there’s no real level playing field in those contractual relationships.
Hard disagree. No one is forcing people to work as flight attendants. It’s voluntary employment with significant public safety responsibilities. In US aviation, strict drug and alcohol testing is mandated for safety roles. The law recognizes the risks and actively limits employer discretion where public safety is at stake. Fact is heavy-handed European privacy laws impose a reckless and superficial notion of “privacy” across the board, and largely for political reasons. The US model accepts some limits on privacy when the potential consequences of impairment or negligence are catastrophic. And I’d add the US legal system does give individuals protections when dealing with large organizations: workplace safety rules, anti-discrimination laws, whistleblower protections, consumer regulations etc
Those protections are on a completely different level. You only need to look at the recent nonsense about mistake fares, where large organisations professionally engaged in selling flights are protected by statute (not even case law!) from their own ineptitude in pricing them, to get a flavour of regulatory capture in the USA. That would never be allowed in England, let alone the Roman-influenced legal systems of the continent. And don’t get me started on ‘at will’ employment where staff can be fired, not just without reason, without notice and even get prevented from returning to their place of work to collect their stuff and bid farewell to their colleagues.
The above is not to say that US citizens and their elected representatives aren’t at liberty to define the law of their land. However, anyone who thinks that US law comes anywhere near the European levels of protection/redress available to individuals in their dealings with institutions/organisations is clueless, if not deluded.
Thw question is how the heck did he afford it on the starvation wages Broken Airways pay their team?
A carrier to avoid if you want comfort, reliability, honesty or value.
– I’m a British global frequent flyer
I though there was a joke amongst BA frequent flyers that only Americans refer to the airline as “British.” Wouldn’t a Briton almost inevitably reply to the question “who are you flying?” by simply saying “BA.”
I see an improving trend with BA here…. With this incident the F/A was not dancing in the Business class aisle and seemed confined to the lav. Which brings to mind the indecent exposure charge. If one is in a secured lav, fully nude, and someone outside gains entry, is that considered indecent exposure ? I thought there was an expectation of complete privacy once inside a secured lav….
@Jerry, using the abbreviation is indeed the most common descriptor, but the airline is also affectionately referred to as ‘Bloody Awful’.
Again, hard disagree, and the data doesn’t back up that kind of posturing.
“At will” contracts are not the horror story Europeans make them out to be. They’re the reason the US labor market is dynamic. Higher job turnover means faster rehiring and more opportunities for people to move up. In Germany around 0.1 % of workers are laid off in a given month. In the US it’s about 1 %. That means companies take risks and create jobs. Workers can switch jobs easily and wages adjust upward.
Europe’s “protections” look generous but they come at the cost of stagnation. When SAP cut jobs it had to pay 3 years of salary per worker. Volkswagen’s restructuring dragged on for over a year because of union blockades. That makes companies wary of hiring in the first place, raises costs, and starves startups of investment.
The entire European system is captured by entrenched insiders. Rigid firing laws protect workers already in stable jobs (including unproductive workers) while keeping others locked out. Youth unemployment in much of Europe has been chronically 2x or 3x US levels for a long time. The supposed protection is just a barrier that forces the young, immigrants, and anyone without connections into permanent insecurity.
And look at the bigger picture. Western Europe’s GDP per capita is about $63k. In the US $86k. That gap has widened since the 90s. Productivity used to be almost on par but it’s now only 80% of the US. And it isn’t because Europeans taxes are giving them a great lifestyle. Median american households have about 16% more disposable income than German households, even after accounting for taxes and benefits. Only the poorest 10% of Americans end up worse off than their European counterparts. For the broad middle class and above, Americans still take home more spendable income despite paying for things like health insurance out of pocket.
Europe has chosen to make itself poorer under the banner of worker protection, and the people paying the highest price are the workers who never get the chance to break in. Those outcomes are the direct cost of the model you’re defending. A high price to pay for the right to “bid farewell to your colleagues” …
Nonsense. There’s no objective ‘hard data’, you’ve just got a hammer and everything looks like a nail to you.
The USA takes a high risk-high reward approach, Europe prioritises slower growth which is more equitable and sustainable.
The labour market is of course bound to be much more dynamic where people can move across states without having to change their social security arrangements, professional registrations, and so on. These things take decades to harmonise. Unemployment rates aren’t directly comparable as they count them differently, but they’re of course higher in Europe- that’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
Again, that’s not to say that the US approach is useless. It just reflects a completely different attitude to risk management and associated issues- and perhaps a certain amount of (over) confidence in some people in terms of their perception of their ability to handle any crises…
Nope, calling higher unemployment a “feature” rather than a failure is, charitably, spin. If protection and equity were really the goal, Europe’s system would deliver better outcomes for those at the bottom. It doesn’t. Everyone bar the bottom 10% in the US else is better off than a comparable European. That is material reality.
The harmonization argument is also wrong. Americans didn’t suddenly invent interstate licensing in 1995 when european productivity started to slide. What changed was Europe doubling down on rigid labor protections, high barriers to hiring and firing, and truly suffocating regulation.
And “slower but more equitable” doesn’t match the results. Europe entrenches privilege for insiders and shuts out outsiders. Those in secure jobs are coddled, no matter how poorly they perform, but the cost is borne by everyone else – young people, talented immigrants pushed into the black economy, and anyone without connections stuck on the margins. That is not equity. The startling outliers are Denmark and Sweden, which smartly pair flexible firing rules with generous welfare and enjoy far more dynamic economies as a result.
The American model isn’t perfect. There is a lot to criticize. But it is false to say Europe has chosen a fairer, more sustainable path. What it has largely chosen is stagnation dressed up as compassion, caving into unions on the left and populists on the right, and sadly everyone is poorer for it. I know from private conversations that a lot of EU officials admit as much behind closed doors, but the reflexive anti-Anglosphere feeling among voters is stark, making anything looking like US-style labor market reforms electorally difficult.
The US debt to GDP ratio is about 125% (or more than 150% of the equivalent figure for the Eurozone) and keeps growing- Bloomberg published something yesterday attempting to guess whether it would continue to be sustainable at 250%! It’s no wonder that their figures look better than everyone else’s and their stock markets are still booming, they’ve brought forward decades of consumption.
I don’t know about the reference to 1995, but the EU expansion in 2004 added 9 states overnight. I don’t recall the US incorporating any meaningful amount of states in recent years, nor did they adopt the dollar at the beginning of this century.
Employment protections certainly haven’t prevented the likes of Poland massively grow their per capita GDP. That anti-union sentiment also is completely outdated – employee representatives are involved in boards and, beyond improving industrial relations, can actually add value to an organisation through helping drive changes to ways of working (obviously not all unions are like that, and there’s variability even across different branches of the same union).
Anyone who thinks that a more liquid labour market or a different consumer rights regime would make any immediate difference to the institutional/structural issues faced by the EU’s desire to expand and harmonise standards is merely incapable of distinguishing between correlation and causation.
@PM Lol what drivel. The US stock boom isn’t a debt mirage. That reflects earnings power from sectors Europe failed to build.
Poland’s success is an example of what happens when you move away from protections, not when you double down on them. Poland grew fast after 2004 because it liberalized compared to Western Europe. The polish labor market was more flexible, wages were lower, capital flowed in because companies could hire and fire without the costs of France, Italy, or Germany. Western Europe stagnated while Poland, Hungary, and Romania surged from a low base. Their real GDP per capita more than doubled since 2000, which actually supports my point that openness and flexibility drive growth, not “protections”.
That is the causal channel, not correlation. When failure is catastrophic and adjustment is slow, investment, hiring, and innovation all shrink. The result is fewer world scale firms, lower productivity, and lower incomes. Call it “equity” if you want, but it comes at a cost in living standards and household wealth.
It would be highly amusing, if not quite poetic justice, for the airline to be held liable under employment law as a result of the brilliant idea to have the guy fly for 12 hours or whatever when he had obviously been unwell.
If they wanted to keep things informal, the lead FA could have had a word with him and agree to register the episode as sickness absence that’s been duly reported by the employee himself. If they thought that it needed dealing with formally, they should have left him at the origin airport and arranged a medical examination.
Meth abuse is more dangerous than opiate abuse. Full psychosis
Opiate abuse inhibits respiratory drive to the point where you stop breathing, and don’t start again before your brain dies. It’s just as bad as amphetamine abuse.
Yes we need names! And pictures!
Pity! I am assuming he will get drug rehabilitation and fully paid health care, and then back to his job- employment according to the less strict British labor laws…than in the USA.
Honestly, having dealt with family members with drug problems for years, I’ve learned the hard way that the “this is someone’s personal crisis, so let’s circle the wagons” approach doesn’t do anyone any good, least of all the individual in question. Public shaming is a powerful signal that you messed up royally and need to turn your life around.
“We don’t need names, and we certainly don’t need sensationalism”
So then why have a video he appears in as part of the post?