Jail Ordered for Pilots Who Flew Drunk

Three former Northwest Airlines pilots convicted of flying a passenger plane while intoxicated were sentenced to prison today, two for a year and the other to 16 months.

U.S. District Judge James Rosenbaum also imposed three years’ probation on each, telling them: “Gentlemen, you are good men who have done a bad thing.”

The judge said the pilots’ actions amounted to a breach of faith between the traveling public and the pilots.

“It is a crime against our sense of security. In that sense, all of us are a victim of this crime,” he said.

The sentences were within federal guidelines, which recommended 12 to 18 months. Rosenbaum left open the possibility that they remain free pending their appeals.

The defendants--Capt. Norman Lyle Prouse, 51, of Conyers, Ga.; 1st Officer Robert Kirchner, 36, of Highland Ranch, Colo., and flight engineer Joseph Balzer, 35, of Antioch, Tenn.--were convicted of flying while intoxicated on a hop from Fargo, N.D., to Minneapolis the morning of March 8.

Prouse, who had the highest blood-alcohol concentration in a test given two hours after the flight landed, was the one who received the 16-month sentence. The judge told him that his acknowledged alcoholism was not “a license to kill.”

In the tests after the flight was completed, Prouse had a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.13%, Kirchner’s was 0.06% and Balzer’s was 0.08%.

At the trial, the pilots had argued that the fact that the flight was uneventful showed that they were not rendered incapable of flying by the alcohol they had drunk the night before.

They were the first pilots to be convicted under a 1986 law aimed at cracking down on substance abuse in the transportation industry.