Corey Slone was having a tough day when he stepped onto the flight deck of an airliner at Miami International Airport one hot day in 2002. He had slept through his wake-up calls at the hotel. Panicked, adrenalin hit Slone like a freight train as he quickly showered, shaved, packed and dashed for the gate.

He was still drunk from the night before.

Slone caught a hotel shuttle to the airport and made it through security to the aircraft moments before it was scheduled to depart. “I got on the aircraft and stowed my bag,” he said. “I started asking myself, ‘OK. What do I need to do to get this thing going?’”

That’s when the bottom fell out. “Within about a minute, an ops person and the captain show up and say, ‘Hey, maybe you should get all of your stuff and get off the airplane.'”

Slone had been found out. He was ordered to take a DoT Reasonable Suspicion test. The result: his blood alcohol content was .156 percent—almost four times the maximum legal amount as defined by the FAA. It was 10 hours since he had stopped drinking the night before.

Alone back at the hotel, Slone called his wife and confessed that he had been drinking on the road for months—in spite of his promise to stop. He apologized to the man who’d helped him get on board with the airline. He was overwhelmed by humiliation and fear, realizing that his drinking was about to cost him his aviation career.

It was “just absolute shame. I mean, just an absolute low point,” Slone said. He contemplated suicide.

The incident cost Slone his FAA medical certificate, his ratings and, therefore, his flight status. But because he worked for a major airline, he was able to take a pilot’s single path back to the flight deck. He was accepted by the Human Intervention Motivation Study—HIMS.

Support for Airline Crew

HIMS began in 1974 as a study of substance abuse among flight crewmembers spearheaded by the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) and funded by the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). It was a test program, aimed at helping recovering pilots find a path back to flight status. From that point, the FAA began treating addiction as a medical condition rather than a moral failing.  

“Before 1974, if you were diagnosed with alcoholism, the FAA terminated your medical certificate, rendering you ineligible to fly,” explained Slone, now the National HIMS chairman and chairman of the HIMS Advisory Board.

Under HIMS, pilots battling addiction are supported by a team of both flight and medical professionals. “Aviation medical examiners [AMEs] are part of the team,” said Dr. Michael Berry, the FAA’s Federal Air Surgeon. “That person acts as a sort of conductor…to make sure that all the various pieces fit together.” Berry oversees the Special Issuance of a Medical Certificate program under FAR 67.401, the document that serves as the backbone.

In addition to AMEs, each team has a mental-health professional who specializes in addiction. There is a peer pilot—someone from within the addicted pilot’s own organization, preferably someone who has battled addiction and successfully returned to flight. There is also a management pilot from within the recovering pilot’s company, who frequently assesses the addict’s progress both in recovery and in returning to the cockpit. There are often other team members, such as Employee Assistant Program (EAP) representatives and a neuropsychologist to assess the physical effects of addiction in each case, Berry said.

Like most of the 6,000 pilots who have successfully participated in the HIMS program since 1974, Slone entered a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility, a residential program where he began his long, often difficult road to recovery. He entered a 12-step program. Most important, Slone said, he recognized and admitted that he had a drinking problem. “It’s very humbling to climb back into a small airplane again and have to regain your certificates,” he said. Almost two years from the day he was pulled from the flight deck at Miami International, Slone was back in uniform.

Over the past 43 years, Berry said, airlines have become strong partners in the process of returning a recovering addict to the flight deck. Each carrier has its own individual process, often involving ALPA or other pilot unions.  

Bizav Pilots on Their Own

Berry, Slone and others describe airline participation in the HIMS program as “robust.” However, they say the situation for pilots involved in business aviation is much different.

“There are no organized efforts within business aviation to implement a program broadly,” said Dr. Quay Snyder, program manager for the FAA/ALPA HIMS organization and long-time member of the NBAA Safety Committee. In the realm of business aviation, “Most companies continue to treat this as a behavior and terminate someone with this medical problem.”

Berry concurred, saying the HIMS program is often identified within general aviation as “that program for airline pilots.” Because flight departments in business aviation are much smaller than the airlines, business organizations often cannot support a pilot battling addiction through the nine to 24 months generally needed for a pilot to complete rehab and meet the requirements for returning to flying.

“The perception of whoever runs the company is that alcoholics or drug abusers are morally corrupt people, and owners or flight department managers simply don’t want people like that in the company,” said Berry.

But businesses understand things when stated in business terms, said Snyder. “From a financial perspective… the data today makes it entirely appropriate to look at something in the neighborhood of a 25 or 30:1 return on investment,” he added, pointing to the financial justification for retaining a pilot through the recovery process and eventual return to flight. 

Snyder advocates the incorporation of a HIMS program into the safety management systems (SMS) of business aviation operations worldwide, likening it to SMS requirements for crew rest.

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