Airlines are resorting to random testing of their flight crews to prevent the use of drink and drugs.

Emirates Airlines yesterday signed up the British drugs-testing company Cozart, which makes kits used to test for drugs including alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, amphetamine and heroin.

The airline will test random urine samples taken from staff flying their routes from Britain and the rest of Europe to Australia, the Middle East, Far East and the United States.

Virgin Airlines has also signed up a similar deal with Cozart, The Times has learnt.

Alcohol can be detectable in urine samples for about 12 hours after a heavy drinking session and cannabis can be detected a couple of days after someone has smoked the drug.

Chris Hand, chief executive of Cozart, told The Times: “If it is a safety-critical job it is important. The workplace will want to know if they have a drug user that can compromise safety.”

While some airlines have been introducing drink tests on their pilots for several years, it is not known how many younger cabin crew take illegal drugs when out clubbing at home or overseas.

Commenting on the Emirates contract, Dr Hand added: “They will be using urine tests. It is for all their staff — pilots and cabin crews. This is the first airline which we can go public on. We have been contracted to other international airlines over the past year.”

In February 2003 a BA pilot, Simon Robinson, then 53, was sacked after failing a breath test before he was due to fly 79 passengers from Stockholm.

Later that year two more BA pilots, Captain William McAu-liffe, then 50, and first officer David Ryan, then 26, resigned after being accused of being over the prescribed limit while in charge of a passenger jet and removed from a London-bound flight at Oslo.

In a separate incident, Richard Harwell, then 55, a Virgin Atlantic pilot, was arrested at Washington’s Dulles airport in December 2003 on charges of being drunk before he was due to fly a 747 jet to London.

He was later sentenced to 60 days in prison, but allowed to go free because he had served all but three days of the sentence while waiting to go to court.

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