Passengers convinced Russian pilot was drunk

RUSSIA'S flag air carrier Aeroflot has taken another blow to its reputation after a newspaper detailed an incident where over 100 passengers demanded that an apparently drunk pilot be taken off the plane.

The first sign of trouble came when the pilot slurred his words during the pre-flight announcement, said The Moscow Times,, quoting passengers aboard the December 28 flight from Moscow to New York, including one of its own reporters.

"The first thought that occurred to me was, 'This guy is drunk'," passenger Khatuna Kobiashvili told the newspaper.

"His speech was so slurred it was hard to tell what language he was speaking."

When the pilot, Alexander Cheplevsky, emerged from the cockpit of the Boeing 767 jet after refusing to do so for half an hour, he was red-faced with bloodshot eyes and appeared unsteady on his feet, the newspaper said.

"I don't think there's anyone in Russia who doesn't know what a drunk person looks like," Katya Kushner, another passenger on Aeroflot's flight 315, said.

"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'," Ms Kushner told the paper.

Alarmed passengers pleaded with flight attendants, crew and several Aeroflot representatives who boarded the plane, and over 100 of them signed a statement saying they believed Cheplevsky was drunk, The Moscow Times reported.

The crew was replaced after three hours but the airline at first dismissed the passengers' concerns: "The flight attendants were telling us that we were crazy," Ms Kushner said.

Three weeks after the incident, Aeroflot said in a statement that Mr Cheplevsky might have suffered a stroke immediately before the flight and that tests had found no signs of intoxication.

In a bizarre twist, one of the passengers was Ksenia Sobchak, the host of a popular Russian television reality show and daughter of a former St Petersburg mayor who has pledged to use her influence to keep the pilot grounded.

"It took him three tries to say the words 'duration of flight'," Sobchak told Echo of Moscow radio after the incident, adding: "I will fight to make sure that this person is never again at the controls of an airplane."

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