When passengers on Aeroflot Flight 315 heard the pilot make his preflight announcement, they knew something was amiss. The pilot's voice was garbled, barely intelligible — and that was in his native Russian. When he switched to English, it was impossible to understand him at all.
"The first thought that occurred to me was, 'This guy is drunk,'" said Khatuna Kobiashvili, a passenger on the Moscow-New York flight. "His speech was so slurred it was hard to tell what language he was speaking."
As passengers, including a Moscow Times reporter, related their concerns to the flight crew, they were told to "stop making trouble" or get off the Boeing 767 jet. A passenger who called Aeroflot's head office received a similar rebuff. "They told me that it was impossible for a pilot to be drunk and hung up the phone," said the passenger, Tatyana Vorontsova.
After a chaotic hour during which passengers pleaded with flight attendants, crew and several Aeroflot representatives who boarded the plane, unexpected help came from socialite and TV host Ksenia Sobchak, who was also on the plane, and all four pilots were replaced.
Aeroflot spokeswoman Irina Dannenberg refused to comment for this article, telling a reporter to "read about it on the Internet." Immediately after the incident, Dannenberg told Komsomolskaya Pravda that the pilots were removed from the plane because of "mass psychosis" among the passengers. In the same interview, Dannenberg said Aeroflot would sue Sobchak if the costs of delaying the flight were "very large."
Check out the article at the Moscow Times for more details.
Nearly three weeks later, Aeroflot issued a statement saying the pilot, Alexander Cheplevsky, might have suffered a stroke immediately before the flight. Tests administered after the incident found no signs of intoxication, it said.
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