Bob CollinsNorthwest Airlines has been relegated to the ash heap of history, but it made a bit of a proud return to the nation’s consciousness on Sunday when Norman Lyle Prouse told his story to CBS’ Sunday Morning.
Prouse was one of three pilots who flew a DC-9 from Fargo to Minneapolis while drunk; the three had spent the previous evening in a Moorhead bar in 1990.
Two other pilots — Robert Kirchner and Joseph Balzer (whom I interviewed in this space in 2009) — went to prison for a year.
Prouse got clean. Then began serving his 16-month sentence.
He eventually went back to Northwest, retiring as a captain of a 747 in 1998.
There’s a lot of love in the CBS Sunday Morning for Northwest, which ushered in the era of treating alcoholics in the workplace as ill; not a mention of the union that had to fight the company on the issue.
“No Northwest pilot ever survived anything like this and their situation wasn’t 10 percent as bad as mine was – I knew it was over,” Prouse told a meeting of the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office in September.
