Is this the story you were thinking of? It was his other girlfriend who was murdered.
I have not looked up the exact standards on convictions. But …
In general a pilot’s *license *is good forever. Once obtained you will keep it unto death. There’s no renewal process like with driver’s licenses. Unless …
You’re accused of violations of the FAA’s operating & admin regs. In that case you’re tried and convicted in an FAA kangaroo court and the penalties assessed are fines, temporary license suspensions, and/or permanent license revocation.
That’s half the story. Here’s the other half:
In order to actually *use *your pilot’s license you need to meet certain recency of flight requirements, pass a periodic refresher course, and maintain a medical certificate. The recency and refresher requirements depend on what kind of flying you’re doing, but for non-professionals they’re all more or less honor system; you log in your personal log that you’ve complied and everybody beleives you. IOW, there’s no Federal bureaucracy tracking that.
Air carriers are required to track this stuff and perform the refresher training, and document everything. Which they always do carefully. The Feds have the right to audit the carriers’ records but generally don’t.
Which leaves the medical. The medical exam and the corresponding exam application paperwork is the one repetitive interaction every pilot, weekend or pro, has with the FAA. For round numbers, pros do it every 6 months and hobbyists every 2 years.
So every time, in addition to listing every doctor’s visit and every medication and every illness in your life to date, you also have to list every conviction bigger than a moving violation. Drunk / drugged driving counts as “bigger than a moving violation” You also have to consent to them searching the national drunk driver database.
All of this goes to attitude. The FAA demands an attitude called “mature rule follower”. There’s no room for folks, even hobbyists, who believe that rules are for the little people. And the thought is that convictions for darn near anything, even tax evasion, are indicative of a bad attitude. Which can be medicalized as “uncooperative personality disorder” or some other psychobabble.
Hmmm…
My flight instructor many years ago said his instructor was a pilot in the Danish Air Force until he took his jet under a bridge in Copenhagen. Then he was teaching in Cessna 150’s in Canada.
Rules…
In a response to that kind of thing we now have something called the Pilot Records Act which essentially means that any and all training & evaluating you get at any employer will follow you forever. So no more flunking out at Employer A then just “forgetting” to mention that when interviewing at Employer B.
Under the current US regs (in effect since about 1990) Employer B is required to ask Employer A for your training and evaluation history, and Employer A is required to provide all of it. Employer A is fully indemnified by law against any adverse consequences this causes for you.
nm. Double post somehow.
People say things like that…
More likely he got drunk and <disgraced himself>…
Or just got sick of being on report for various inabilities to keep to military perfection … (getting marked down in the military is easy… just be too good and show up the team leader at the time… who gets to sabotage your averages… )