Praise the Lord they could walk

So they get all the way to the runway before anyone says anything? Are people insane? You smell alcohol on a pilot and you joke about it as he sits in the cockpit?

What a world we live in. But then of course we have the defense attourney saying:

"Mr. Hughes was able to see, hear, walk, talk, etcetera," attorney James Rubin said of his client.

And he goes on to argue that they weren't actually operating the airplane at the time. They were in fact being tugged to the runway so the tug driver had control of the plane. My question is, who did they expect to fly the plane once they arrived at the end of the runway?