Recent high-profile incidents involving allegedly drunk airline pilots reporting for duty have renewed the call for more random drug/alcohol testing of flight crews. Public hypersensitivity over anything aviation even led CNN to host an on-line poll that asked if all pilots should be tested for alcohol – to which 89 percent replied yes.

Pilots, meanwhile, point to a relative dearth of alcohol-induced crashes and wonder what all the ruckus is about. Good sense, it seems, keeps alcohol-impaired pilots out of the cockpit the vast majority of the time, because the pilot’s sitting in the seat that frequently hits first. …