A British Airways pilot has spoken of the disgust felt among the airline’s flight crew at Mike Beaton’s behaviour.
Beaton, a first officer, was sacked after bragging to colleagues about snorting cocaine from a woman’s bare breasts in South Africa before trying to fly a full plane back to Britain.
A BA captain told MailOnline Travel anonymously: ‘When we talk to pilot colleagues we feel extremely let down by this person.’
When asked how often it happened for a pilot to become under the influence of alcohol in the cockpit, he replied: ‘It is more than rare. Unthinkable.’
British Airways has told its staff to report any concerns about senior colleagues using drugs following Beaton’s misdeeds. The sun.
First Officer Mike Beaton was fired by British Airways after a night of debauchery in South Africa
Beaton was reported to BA management after he sent text messages to a flight attendant bragging about how he had been “very, very naughty” with two women and two men in Johannesburg.
The father-of-one told how the group ‘did shots, downed a bottle of vodka’, then ‘sniffed cocaine out of a topless woman’s bum’ and then ‘shooted for ages’ before trying to board a plane back to London to fly.
“(I) was so stupid I couldn’t even lift my head until I was 2,” Beaton wrote.
It has been a remarkable fall from grace for Beaton, who lives in an idyllic £750,000 home in Devon with his Polish wife and their five-year-old daughter.
The boastful text messages Mr Beaton sent to a flight attendant about his sordid evening in Johannesburg
Together they run a luxury treehouse retreat company called Happy Owls, which was in The Times’ top 12 treehouse hotels this year.
Beaton’s mother served as an officer in the RAF and has been a magistrate in Peterborough since 2005.
She lives with the disgraced pilot’s stepfather, an RAF pilot who has flown every member of the royal family in a career that saw him invested as a member of the Royal Victorian Order.
Cases where pilots were drunk before taking control are extremely rare, as our pilot source stated.
One serious incident involving the BA crew occurred in 2000, when a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary caught a captain, Chris Salmon, and a first officer, James Sharples, drinking heavily in Barcelona before flying to Gatwick.
Salmon reportedly drank seven bottles of beer and more than a bottle of wine the night before the flight The timeswhile Sharples, it was claimed, drank ‘at least eight pints of beer’.
Salmon was heard saying, “I can’t believe I have to take a plane back.”
After the revelation, The Times notes, Salmon resigned and Sharples was fired.
British Airways told MailOnline after Beaton was sacked: ‘Safety is always our top priority. The matter has been referred to the CAA and this person no longer works for us.”