Mid-flight alcoholic menace – The World sits on time bomb

Global events unfolding in contemporary era within the aviation transport industry indicates a very repugnant picture, which if global leaders fail to confront such menace head-on, is likely to spell doom to the entire human race; where its emanating catastrophic consequences would be extremely difficult to obliterate from deep memory of homo sapiens on the universe.

Observation

I had travelled from Toronto-Canada’s Pearson airport enroute Europe to Ghana per a leading global airline. After the usual ration of food for consumption, a considerable number of passengers on board the flight began requesting for a particular beverage.

Flight attendants did not hesitate than to satisfy the whims and caprices of these travelers. My flight from Europe to KIA-Ghana was where I became so perturbed throughout the journey.

Beside where I was mandated to sit were young men numbering approximately ten in number already in a very volatile frenzied disposition. I readily sourced that some of them were already emptying bottled alcoholic beverages which they had brought on-board the flight.

As usual, these young men including other substantial number of passengers requested for more of these beverages amid unleashing intolerable commotion interspersed with heckling and whilst contemptuously wielding empty bottles, which of course, its alcoholic content have duly been exhausted.

At this point, I decided to make few enquiries why most passengers on-board the flight were deeply enthralled in such requisitions. I came to conclusion that the supposed beverage in highest supplication was pure alcoholic drinks sorely preserved on-board for passenger consumption.

The palpable reality here is that I have undertaken similar trips into fewer jurisdictions abroad over the years and have been confronted with such demands of similar bottled beverages from attendants in the course of flight expedition; little did I fathom that these medium sized bottled beverages were pure alcoholic thirst-quencher.

Alcoholism, permitted on flights? This is where the danger looms.

Negative effects of alcoholism

It is indisputable fact that alcohol consumption has severe devastating consequences to the human anatomy, even most exclusively, when such consumption happens to take place on flights.

Apparently, persons with acute antagonistic ‘personality disorders’ in the context of alcohol intake could easily be triggered or exasperated to cause extreme mayhem or nuisance once such individual becomes tipsy.

A consumer could go haywire and be so destructive, likewise the professional Pilot, who, under the influence of alcohol could end up messing the lives of people entrusted in their care.

Indeed, the world is witnessed to the unfortunate incidence that has bedeviled global aviation industry in recent times.

It would be recalled that on October 29, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashed into the Java Sea shortly after takeoff from Soekarno–Hatta International Airport in Jakarta en route to Depati Amir Airport in Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia.

All 189 passengers and crew did not survive, all were murdered in cold blood. This is not an isolated incident. On hindsight, there are overwhelming chronicle of air crashes most specifically in this very year of our Lord, 2018; aviation experts are still making frantic efforts to unravel the probable origins to some of these unfortunate mortalities, yet answers to that continue to elude mankind.

Probable causes

Much as global influential leaders and of course aviation professionals are ascribing most of these needless incidents to either defective software or general mechanical failure or perhaps the incessant terrorist activities that are incontrovertibly in vogue among extremists in todays world, the probability of excessive alcoholic consumption by crewing Pilots, which in effect is a human factor, could arguably not be ruled out; in that a highly intoxicated individuals vision, reasoning power and memory becomes so impeded, that, to execute given tasks with precision could turn out to be so problematic.

The Plea

In this connection, I’m compelled to come to conclusion that, the above postulation could invariably also be a major root cause to most of these fatalities confronting humanity, which of course, needed to be looked at.

Being a professional member of Chartered Institute of Logistics & Transport, CILT-GHANA, it behooves me to sound the clarion call, to world leaders, to tender in rational policy initiatives that would ensure that not a minutest of an alcoholic beverage in any form, whatsoever, is stowed on-board flights; this is to save our much-cherished aviation industry by guaranteeing the safety of the aircraft and every single passenger which are of paramount importance and besides to sustain the dictum that air transport is still categorized as the most safest mode of transportation universally.

The writer is a member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics & Transport, CILT-GHANA
Tel Number +233 244250922
E-mail; logisticscontrolltd@yahoo.com