Agreed. Although in the intervening 6 months roughly 10,000 Americans have died because a certain number of individuals can’t control their drinking and driving. And this has been going on every 6 months for almost a century now whereas GermanWings was one of a very few such incidents ever. Some perspective is in order.
As a separate matter I would make the small distinction that I was talking about US regulation and that event happened under German regulation.
The regulatory details doubtless differ, but the underlying big picture facts are clear: That guy almost certainly knew, or should have known, that he was having a problem.
I have zero experience with the psychology of severe depression. I do understand in general that mental illness of all sorts is a problem because the thing the person uses to exercise sound judgment about obtaining treatment is exactly the thing that isn’t working right.
In drug rehab programs, patients are often instructed not to consume tonic water or other sources of quinine because in the past, because heroin is often cut with quinine, or at least was in bygone days. Thus an addict with a urine drug screen positive for quinine can’t plead that he drank a tonic and that’s why it’s positive; both drinking tonic and shooting heroin are against the program rules.
That’s all I’ve got. Doubt it carries over to airline pilots. Though I have known pilots who did use heroin.
This seems that it would require pilots to attempt to be their own physicians, reporting themselves based on naive paint-by-number diagnoses that they did using WebMD, Wikipedia, message boards, and chatting with their sister who might not be a doctor but once played one on TV. Is there a threshold of obviousness here, or are pilots actually or theoretically required to become experts in all branches of medicine so that they can immediately diagnose anything that they might get?
Perhaps it is reasonable to say that if a pilot is vomiting blood every hour then they ought to know that they probably have a serious medical condition. It is not at all reasonable, imho, to require that pilots be able to download their own 23andme data and diagnose any and all genetic disorders that they might carry and then perform an expert psychiatric wellness assessment session on themselves and determine how likely it is that their fear of missing a diagnosis is reasonable or whether it is evidence of an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
The point is simply to be very proactive about your health.
Have what you think is a cold? Don’t go to work. Go to the doc instead. Think you hurt your shoulder playing tennis? Don’t go to work. Go to the doc instead. Have a nagging feeling you’re low on energy or have some vague occasional but recurrent ache in one spot in your innards? Don’t be like your Dad and assume it’s nothing. Go to the doc & get it checked out as soon as you recognize it. etc.
The hard part comes when you recognize that you don’t have an infinite supply of paid sick leave. Depending on your employer and seniority, you may have zero. And if you do develop some real problem the sooner you see the doc, the sooner your work life & financial life falls apart. We can lose our careers permanently over medical issues that would be a total non-event for office workers. Given all this it’s easy to rationalize that whatever it is I can ignore it for a couple years and with luck it’ll resolve itself.
Sadly, I was one of two who were under 50 - kids don’t learn to fly much anymore.
re. FAA and medical issues.
If you have any disease called ‘cancer’, you can’t get even the baby certification for Private Pilot, let alone the much more restrictive certification required for Airline Pilot.
The drug prohibition has been mentioned.
As to sense of humor with the FAA: the med certification for Private Pilot is your basic check-up with added visual and audio testing.
One fellow, while at the Dr. for his medical test (that point is important), saw the EKG machine and asked about it. The doc said: Not Required for Private Pilot test.
Oh, come on - just hook it up
The doc complies.
EKG test detects defect. Because this was the FAA-required test, the doc now knows why this guy should not fly.
The FAA pulled his license within the week.
If he had waited for a non-FAA session, he would have passed the Private Pilot test. Because the problem was ‘on the record’ of the FAA test, it counted as reason to fail.
NOTE: EKG is require for airline certification, not PP.
The FAA mindset is largely 'If a person is crazy enough to try to defy gravity, he’s on his own.
If he, by flying something in such a way as to harm people on the ground, he cannot operate a plane.
This is why the ultralights do not require certification nor do their pilots and passengers - those machines are not ‘aircraft’ in the eyes of the FAA, largely because, when they fall down, they don’t go as big a ‘boom’ as do ‘real’ aircraft.
That’s a pity. I fly with three pilots who have had cancer, aside from the disease itself it hasn’t been a problem for their medical. While they were sick they were off work then once they had received treatment / surgery they were back. Non FAA licenses.
There’s a pretty long list of diseases, including some forms of cancer, that the FAA will accept for even professional pilots. But in each case the disease has to be well understood and well controlled.
So in the case of something like cancer you quit flying at the initial diagnosis, throughout the treatment, and for several months thereafter while they wait to see about recurrences and how well you recover from the acute meds & treatments and how well you tolerate any chronic meds you may need. Which chronic meds are taken from a highly restricted list including only non-cutting-edge low-side effect meds.
Many, but far from all, professional pilots are able to continue flying after things like cancer, diabetes, and even some cardiac events. But the effort to return to work often takes a year or more. And sometimes there’s a tradeoff between the medically optimal treatment and those acceptable to FAA.
Late add: Just a couple weekends ago one of my coworkers and longtime friends had a heart attack. She’s in her early 50s, younger than me. No one can know yet whether she’ll ever be able to return to work. The odds aren’t good. 5 minutes before that happened she was the picture of health & vitality, an athletic person who takes good care of herself.
That Sword of Damocles is always there; waiting to fall.
How easy is it for a pilot to collect unemployment and/or ask for an Americans with Disabilities Act “reasonable accommodation” from their employer under these kinds of circumstances? E.g. if you file for Unemployment and claim that you want to fly and can fly, but the meanie FAA said that you aren’t allowed to fly for six months until they are convinced that your owie won’t come back, will they give you the money? I know that unemployment doesn’t usually pay that much - but it can make the difference sometimes. Could you get a full-on disability (e.g. SSI) claim going, or would they just tell you to go work in an office for six months?
As far as Social Security disability goes the SSA website says:
For you to be considered to have a disability by Social Security’s definition, your medical condition must significantly limit your ability to do basic work activities—such as lifting, standing, walking, sitting, and remembering—for at least 12 months. If your medical condition isn’t severe we won’t consider you to be disabled.
So if your doctor says you’ll be better in 6 months, you’re out of luck. Of course, if your doctor says you’re permanently disabled, you’re out of work. Kind of a Catch-22.
Social Security disability is intended as a bottom of the barrel last-ditch support program. Assuming it’s administered correctly, you can only get it when you’re unfit for *any *job. Including parking lot money-taker or Walmart greeter.
The nature of the job you used to have and the impact of your current medical condition on that job is not relevant. Neither is the wages you used to make (and the SS taxes you used to pay) doing whatever you did.
ADA talks about “reasonable accommodation.” Remember that each of us, regardless of occupation, was hired by our employer for a specific job description and set of duties. If you can’t do those duties any more, the employer has the obligation to see if there is a reasonable accommodation of the duties to your new limitations. If not, they are under no obligation to retrain you for a different job, nor even to offer you a different job that you’re both qualified for and could do within your ADA-eligible limitations.
Some employers in some industries try to keep otherwise good workers on. Others don’t see the advantage and send you on your way once its obvious you can no longer do the job you were hired for.
The airline biz is highly, but not universally, unionized. So there’s a big difference between what happens at a union company versus non-union, and a big difference between a large and a small company.
AFAIK unemployment benefits only apply when you’re not an employee. These are state-level benenfits and there are at least 50 sets of details. Unless you’re laid off or terminated you generally can’t get them. In our case you’re essentially an hourly worker who’s not being offered any hours this week, or next, or next. Not eligible in the states I’m familiar with.
Wait, what? Cancer? A diagnosis of cancer does not imply a prognosis of “by the time a normal certification is received you will be incapable of flying.”
By that right pilot licenses should be given within actuarial tables of all kinds, not the least the He’s Too Damn Old ones.
For a real giggle, look up ‘FAA ETOPS’ (Engines Turn or Passengers Swim).
It has been years since engines large enough to push 1/2 of an airliner through the air became available.
But the FAA, years ago, to protect the flying public, ruled that at least 3 engines are required for trans-oceanic flights*.
For the 777 to be legal to fly, each individual plane must be certified under this ‘ETOPS’ program to be legal to fly over large bodies of water.
(ETOPS is Extended Twin Operations something something).
Rather that simply deleting the ‘<3 engines, no fly’ , they came up with this mickey-mouse ‘program’ and treat each plane as an ‘exception’ to the 3-enigine rule.
do not know, but strongly suspect, that the reason the DC-10 and Lockheed L1011 had that third engine in the tail was because of this ‘no twins over oceans’ rule.
That was exactly why they were designed that way. And the advent then massive growth of ETOPS (now EROPS) is exactly what killed them off as economically unviable.
You misunderstood the point of usedtobe’s mention of cancer policy.
The medical certification standards are generally more stringent for professionals than for hobbyists. But the limitations on cancer are equal for all.
The hobbyist certification *is *a stepping stone for those working towards professional status. But many hobbyists have no intention of ever going farther. And they’re still barred from flying until/unless they get the cancer under control. Long term prognosis has nothing to do with it.
Your larger point that it’d be wise for aspiring professionals to have a better understanding of long term health issues and the absolute necessity for insurance against career ending medical events is spot-on.