“That’s what surprises us, because he was an airline pilot and he flew for Spirit,” one of Brian K. Halye’s neighbors told a Dayton Daily News reporter on-scene after authorities removed the pilot’s body and that of his wife, Courtney.
Within hours, the Dayton Daily News confirmed that not only was Captain Halye a veteran Spirit Airlines pilot, but that he flew his most recent flight for the ultra-low fare airline six days before his death.
READ: Children find Spirit Airlines pilot, wife dead in apparent overdose
The news spread rapidly with dozens of newspapers, magazines, websites and local and national TV outlets picking up the story.
Since March, the Dayton Daily News made more than 20 federal Freedom of Information Act requests, conducted hours of interviews and weeks of research pouring over thousands of records spanning more than four decades – some never before released to the public – to publish an ongoing series of stories that found:
- Pilots can go years without being selected for a random drug or alcohol test, the newspaper learned in an examination of federal regulations, and it is still unclear the last time Halye was tested. "I'd be surprised if he went through there nine years and never got tested, but it could happen," said Shawn Pruchnicki, an Ohio State University Center for Aviation Studies lecturer, former airline pilot and pharmacist trained in toxicology. "It's a numbers game." The Federal Aviation Administration's own guidance to airlines states it's "not uncommon for some employees to be selected several times, while other employees may never be chosen." Read more coverage:
- Halye, 36, and wife Courtney, 34, died of overdoses of cocaine and the powerful synthetic opioid carfentanil, according to the county coroner. Halye said he liked to "speedball" mixtures of cocaine and the opiate heroin and "had been using drugs for two or three years" prior to his overdose death, his mother-in-law told Centerville police. But Halye's aerospace medical file did not mention a history of using illegal substances, and urine collected during annual aviation medical exams is used to detect diseases, but not drugs, experts told the newspaper. Read more coverage:
- Halye was not the first pilot at Spirit Airlines suspected of using a "speedball." After a full day of domestic and overseas travel in 2007, another Spirit Airlines pilot was given a random drug test that revealed cocaine, morphine and heroin at levels "far above" the minimum required for a positive identification, according to court records. Read more coverage:
- Spirit Airlines was found in non-compliance with federal drug and alcohol testing regulations in the months before Halye's death, including an instance where a scheduled drug test of an employee never took place, according to FAA records reviewed by the newspaper. At least three Spirit employees — including at least two pilots — received verified positive drug tests since 2015, according to federal records the newspaper analyzed in June. A Spirit spokesperson has said the airline "operates with the highest degree of safety" and is "fully compliant with federal regulations." Read more coverage:
- The Air Line Pilots Association, which represents more than 55,000 pilots at 32 airlines, has resisted implementation and expansion of drug and alcohol testing for decades. The union has cited privacy issues and raised questions about the accuracy and expense of the tests. It also advocates redirecting resources into treatment programs for pilots with chemical dependency problems. The union did not comment for the April story. Read more coverage:
In July, the Department of Transportation Inspector General confirmed it opened an audit into the FAA’s Drug Abatement Division, the office that oversees the aviation industry’s compliance with drug and alcohol testing regulations. OIG Program Director Tina Nysted said the audit will include a review of Halye’s death, which the office learned about through newspaper reporting. The audit is expected to finish next year.
Top aviation safety experts hailed the newspaper’s findings and the action it spurred.
Ashley Nunes, a regulatory analyst at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, called the IG’s decision to review Halye’s death after the newspaper’s reporting “a positive move for the American public.”
Malcolm Brenner, a former NTSB psychologist with experience investigating a fatal drug-related passenger airline crash, called the IG audit “a positive development for safety.” With the overdose death and the newspaper’s reporting, Brenner said, “it seems like an appropriate time to reassess the status of testing and treatment programs for airline employees (to) reassure all of us that drugs of abuse are not a factor in this industry.”
The initial breaking news story was the most read of 2017 on the Dayton Daily News’ digital platforms.
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