Japan Airlines canceled Dallas-to-Tokyo flight JL11 on April 24, 2024, after the captain spent the layover drinking until hotel staff called the police. About 157 passengers were stranded. The airline said he had not broken the 12-hour bottle-to-throttle rule and was not drunk at report time. It canceled anyway, citing “the need to assess the captain’s physical and mental well-being.” There was no spare captain in Dallas. People were rebooked, including onto American.
The 49-year-old captain had flown in from Haneda, gone to dinner around six, kept drinking in the hotel lounge, then moved the party into his room. A staffer asked them to quiet down around 2 a.m. Slurred speech and noise were enough for a police visit and a verbal warning. He was not arrested. “It is true that the captain consumed alcohol,” a JAL spokesperson said. The apology was the usual one: sorry to customers, we take this seriously, we will prevent a recurrence.
Dallas Was Not a One-Off
In 2018 a JAL pilot in London blew nearly ten times the airline’s alcohol limit and later went to jail in Britain. After Dallas the pattern did not stop. In late August 2024 another captain was pulled off a Honolulu-to-Japan flight. In August 2025 another Honolulu drinking case delayed passengers for about 18 hours; Japan’s transport ministry had already sent JAL a business-improvement notice over 2024 incidents. In May 2026 two cabin crew failed a pre-duty check after drinking on a Hiroshima layover. JAL banned more than 6,000 flight attendants from drinking on layovers. CEO Mitsuko Tottori, who started as a flight attendant in 1985, took a 30 percent pay cut for two months. Other executives took smaller cuts.
When the people who are supposed to keep the aircraft in one piece start dying or getting drunk on the clock, the public is right to connect the files. See The AEGIS Alliance coverage of the Spirit AeroSystems auditor Joshua Dean, who died weeks after Boeing whistleblower John Barnett. このビートの多くは、 国際ニュース. The original Dallas write-up is in The Mainichi.
