On 11 Jan 2017, at 7:01 PM, Mike Borgelt <[email protected]> wrote: > > The medical for private pilots is mere CYA and virtue signalling by > bureaucrats and vested interests. >
Ha-ha-ha, it’s stupider than that. After the earliest days of aviation, when passenger carrying was starting to pick up steam and governments worked out they wanted to regulate it, they looked around to find the easiest, simplest, least-effort system of regulation they could find: Armed services. Most of the new influx of pilots were ex-military anyway, so lining up civil aviation regs with the services meant they had pilots, instructors, and brass already trained. Sideways shift from military to civilian life at every level in the hierarchy. Along the way, they worked out that every serviceman had a medical (“turn your head and cough”), so civilian pilots needed medicals too. From that harmonious observation, bureaucracies flourished all around the world, adding tests, procedures and complexity on an almost completely arbitrary basis. We now know it was arbitrary from the statistical analyses that have been done in various parts of the world regarding medical incapacitation among pilots with and without medicals. (kinda similar to the way GFA was loosely modelled on military structures: GFA’s CTOs, RTOs, CFIs, Instructors, Duty Pilots form a chain of command. The training system and the way that responsibility for operations was carried by “superiors” draws from that model, in the same way that the General is responsible for the war crimes carried out by his Privates. There’s never really been any justification for pilot medicals, and even the people who practice and administer avmed can’t honestly describe why they do it, with safety cases and measurable statistics. It’s mostly just one of those “we’ve always done it that way” things that grew from the fact that the military had always done it too, coupled with a goodly dose of superstition and make-believe. The sooner it’s flushed away, the better. There are some people who want to fly, and who are genuinely unhealthy and shouldn’t be doing it. Currently, some of these people get class-2 medicals. Those people should be removed from the pilot population, but the global avmed bureaucracy empirically isn’t the best way to do it. - mark _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] http://lists.base64.com.au/listinfo/aus-soaring
