At 09:45 AM 14/10/2013, you wrote:
OK
>I'm not sure you actually read my post. Either that or your
reading comprehension is extremely poor.
Mike Borgelt stated.
>One study in the US was that medical conditions for powered
aircraft pilots were around 1% of accident causes. Fortunately they
had a large body of experience with glider and balloon pilots who
self certify and the medical rate of accident causes was 0.5% or so
amongst them.
Your point being that self reporting medical accident rate is 0.5%
versus 1% for powered a/c pilots?
Yes, surprising isn't it? IIRC the people who did the study didn't
expect that either. They didn't claim that this was significant and
neither do I. What both the authors and I claim is that the medical
causes of aviation accidents are such a small percentage of all
causes that eliminating them won't achieve anything significant in
the way of safety. Of course making the medicals more stringent may
well appear to make things safer in absolute numbers of accidents as
you'll simply eliminate lots of pilots and flying hours.
>Same for the US glider and balloon pilots and both are based on a
large number of events so the stats, even if somewhat uncertain are
likely pretty good.
Before you attack me personally please provide some links to
creditable data with regards to the stats and confidence intervals.
'Likely pretty good' would not get accepted in a published report!
The only person making evidence free assertions is you.
"If there were no medicals, the numbers of accidents do (sic) the
medical causes would be higher."
Where are your links to show that formal aviation medicals have any value?
As I said I don't have the URL to hand for that study and frankly I
can't be bothered looking it up for you. It was over a considerable
period of years and thousands of aircraft, glider and balloon
accidents. IIRC it was linked as a result of a discussion on the old
AUFCHAT group about 7 or 8 years ago. It may have been a post by Boyd
Munro as he used to post there sometimes. It is probably on one of my
PCs. Who knows if the webpage still exists?
The BGA study was from the 1970-75 period in Sailplane and Gliding
and was a response to the usual periodical attempt by the bureaucracy
to "bring things into line" . The bureaucrats retreated that time as
the BGA had shown that the benefits of requiring formal medicals were
negligible while the costs were considerable. You can look up the
back issues somewhere I guess.
The CASA discussion paper from 2002 probably still exists in the
depths of the CASA database. Ask them.
The US EAA and AOPA are currently petitioning the FAA for effective
elimination of the 3rd Class medical for day VFR simple aircraft,
only one other person in the aircraft.
here:
http://www.aopa.org/News-and-Video/All-News/2012/March/20/AOPA-EAA-file-medical-exemption-petition
Do your own Google search and you'll find many posts on this topic.
This has been done to death numerous times and I'm not aware that
anyone has ever shown that formal aviation medicals have any safety
value. Unfortunately the people proposing the elimination of medicals
do their homework, put together the case, get the bureaucrats on side
and then somebody stands up and says "I think it would be safer if we
kept the medicals and I'm a Doctor" whereupon the bureaucrats take
the easy way out.
In the last couple of months we've had posts here from people who are
having trouble with CASA medicals for no really good reason. I know a
fair number of private pilots and most of them do seem to worry about
passing the next one. The risk these people pose to innocent third
parties on the ground or in the air is very small (no I don't have
the numbers or confidence intervals but in the media I hear about far
more ground vehicles hitting houses than aircraft hitting houses) but
all of them drive cars on the roads where vehicles closing at 200kph
are separated by a painted white line and the ability of the drivers to miss.
In engineering there is no virtue in making systems more complex or
expensive than necessary.
There are two questions to ask " what problem are we REALLY trying to
solve here"" and "what does the experimental evidence say?".
Common errors are trying to solve the wrong problem and ignoring
clear experimental results. As a doctor you have a bias to solve the
medical problem even though in the overall system it is a very small
part of the problem.
Before accusing me of using faulty logic you might also like to read
my post properly. I realise now that you probably didn't know that
the BGA didn't have formal medicals. You made an unwarranted
assumption before posting.
Mike
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