Aircraft accidents - what rights do the police have?

Peter wrote:

not disappearing for quite long enough

Or disappear to a pub, where you buy a drink but don’t consume it

I had an emergency landing (at an airport) where
1. The fire brigade made sure that there was no immediate danger, that myself and my passenger (wife) did not need any medical or psychological attention
2. the BGTA (Brigade de Gendarmerie des Transports Aériens) interviewed me and my passenger. I do not remember if they looked at my licenses or other aircraft documents. I had actually met one of them a few months prior on the occasion of a ramp check at an other nearby airfield.
3. I was asked to contact the BEA (AAIB-FR) who were interested in my incident.

That was it.

The Hip Flask Defence puts a lot of onus on the Defence and is very hard to run successfully. If it fails (as it very often does) it probably doesn’t, shall we say, help with sentencing.

Capitaine wrote:

Or disappear to a pub, where you buy a drink but don’t consume it

In Norway where I learned to drive/fly, it was illegal to drink so many hours after having been involved in an incident/accident where one had to assume there might be an investigation… It is too far back, so I do not remember the specifics.

I thought the UK police had the right to take a sample x hours after the incident and then extrapolate it backwards?

Is that actually possible?
I would have thought that different people metabolised alcohol at different rates, rendering it unreliable at best.

flybymike wrote:

I thought the UK police had the right to take a sample x hours after the incident and then extrapolate it backwards?

Is that actually possible?

I would have thought that different people metabolised alcohol at different rates, rendering it unreliable at best.

I have never heard of that happening. Courts deal with the lower of two readings from the intoximeter, which is why it is a good idea for the Police to get the driver on the intoximeter sooner rather than later.

There are some roadside intoximeters which give an approved reading, but normally the driver has to be got back to the custody suite to be tested.

While we are on the subject, drink-driving really does wreck lives, even when there has been no accident. I have seen grown men weep as it suddenly dawns on them that they are going to lose their whole way of life – job, employability, family, home, even their whole businesses – because they are just over the limit.

I tend not to proselytise about drink-drive on moral, social grounds (think of the children of the person you maim or kill) but on the grounds of “think how it will affect you.”

Oh, and there are now effective roadside drug-drive tests as well.

Timothy wrote:

While we are on the subject, drink-driving really does wreck lives, even when there has been no accident. I have seen grown men weep as it suddenly dawns on them that they are going to lose their whole way of life – job, employability, family, home, even their whole businesses – because they are just over the limit.

Very true. I’ve worked on an international airport on and off now for over 30 years and they do have a ZERO limit for anyone who goes airside (tarmac), so basically the only time I can drink at all is when I am on vaccation, as even a beer from the day before can bring up a reading on their meters and if it does, you go home for the day on the first time and hand in your ID forever on the second, together with job and livelyhood. And quite right too, on an airfield like this there should be nobody intoxicated or much less someone who can not have a minimum of discipline.

My prejudice would be that anybody who needed a drink immediately after an accident, is fairly likely to have had one before.

kwlf wrote:

My prejudice would be that anybody who needed a drink immediately after an accident, is fairly likely to have had one before.

Well, judges and magistrates have no such prejudice, of course, because it is trained out of them and they work only on evidence….

…but, as I say, the Hip Flask Defence is very, very difficult to run.