Sure does. "Fly the drunken skies" is not a slogan i had ever hoped to hear. The fact that they have caught two of these guys leaving Great Britain makes me think GB has a better detection process, and the rest of the world is likely letting the drunken pilots fly undetected. It worries me. I hope they tighten up the detection process and are very hard on the pilots who are caught.

Absolutely---and especially because I usually fly with my children. I think an automatic breathalyzer test for all pilots prior to taking off is a must. Sounds like an invasion of privacy but it's just to protect everyone---and it's a large group of people he/she is responsible for, so the pilot should be fine with taking the test.

It's amazing that we protect ourselves from people who may blow up a plane but the very people who pilot the plane could cause us demise as well.

I feel that these types of incidents are the sad minority of pilots, most are responsible people. I suppose the fact that we hear about such incidents and the fact that they get caught and punished actually makes me feel more at ease about flying. In my mind set at least I feel that these incidents are caught before they even come close to the controls, and I would like to think that even if a pilot were to get to the cockpit, the first officer would do his duty and report him, refusing to continue with the flight.

I hope that this is the case anyway, as I do log many miles per year in the air as a passenger.

Yes!

Does this make we worried about air travel?

In a word, no.

Ok... the irrational part of me... will maybe get a little bugged about it for a short while. The same as it did when bombs exploded on the London Underground... for a while that irrational part would irrationally wonder for a monent if some random person might just be another bomber, all the time knowing it was highly unlikely, and just a stupid paranoid thought.

The fact is air accidents and bombs on the Underground are very rare things. The fact that they found a pilot over the limit is shocking, but it doesn't change the fact that only one departure in 2 million is actually involved in serious accident, and even those more often than not do not result in any fatalities.

http://www.airdisaster.com/statistics/
http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/2007-04-16-01.htm
http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/A_Stat.htm

To quote another answer I gave...

-- Quote

The most interesting statistical analysis about this seems to be one by Edmund Hambly, a top British engineer and visiting Professor at Oxford University.

In a 1992 lecture he calculated the number of fatal accidents per 100 million hours in different activities/environments. The numbers he came up with are:

Accident at home, able-bodied 1
Factory work 4
Travel by train 5
Travel by car 30
Travel by airliner 40
Travel by helicopter 500
Fireman in London air-raids 1940 1,000
Rock climbing, while on rock face 4,000

So spending time at home is the safest, though flying is not really all that dangeous either.

-- /Quote

http://www.mahalo.com/answers/society-and-culture/on-average-what-is-the-safest-place-for-someone-to-be-home-in-a-car-in-a-plane-at-work-etc
http://www.nolan-law.com/fear-of-flying-the-production-of-comforting-statistics/

See also:

http://www.mahalo.com/answers/air-travel/what-is-the-probability-that-a-commercial-airline-pilot-will-be-in-an-airplane-crash-at-sometime-in-their-life