All Nippon Airways Captain Sentenced to Prison for Sexual Assault of Flight Attendant
A Captain for All Nippon Airways, the largest airline in Japan, has been sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment by a Tokyo court after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting a young female flight attendant during a layover. The suspect has been identified as Ryota Mise, a 44-year-old Captain who repeatedly grabbed the buttocks of his victim while they walked along a street together and inside a convenience store. The incident occurred during a domestic layover in Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture, while the pair was walking back to their hotel. The flight attendant said she felt like she had no option but to allow the Captain to assault her because she feared he would be able to hurt her career if she refused. The two crew members had met the previous day during a flight to Takamatsu and had gone out with a group of crew for dinner. On the return to the hotel, however, Mise repeatedly grabbed his colleague’s buttocks. He told the court that he thought he had permission to touch the victim, but that defense was dismissed by Judge Takao Okawa, who described the flight attendant’s testimony as “convincing and highly credible.” In the wake of the October 10, 2023, incident, the flight attendant reported her concerns to ANA, and the airline opened an internal investigation. The Captain admitted he had touched the flight attendant and, given his explanation of the events, ANA allowed him to continue working as a pilot. Following this internal investigation, the flight attendant then reported the incident to the police, who arrested Mise. The lengthy investigation culminated in Mise being sentenced to 20 months’ imprisonment on Tuesday – less than the two-and-a-half-year sentence that prosecutors had been seeking. There’s long been concern that workers in some Asian countries feel like they can’t challenge or say no to their superiors. This is a particular issue in the aviation industry, where safety can be compromised due to this culture of being afraid to speak out to someone of a higher rank. Japan Airlines was only recently engulfed in a scandal after it was revealed that a senior flight attendant was caught over the legal alcohol limit ahead of a domestic flight to Tokyo. Alcohol consumption had become such an issue for Japan Airlines that the carrier requires all of its pilots and flight attendants to carry out a pre-flight breath test using a personally issued device. Ahead of this flight, however, the senior flight attendant deliberately didn’t submit the results of her test. Her junior coworkers reminded her to submit the test result, but when she brushed off those concerns, no one pushed back or reported the issue to the company. The senior crew member was eventually caught when she completed a company-conducted test at the airport, causing a delay to the flight. Japan Airlines has now banned flight attendants from consuming any alcohol during layovers, and the carrier’s chief executive took a temporary pay cut over the scandal.
