8 ms·

How do you fix the mental health issue with pilots? My understanding is that as soon as you self report you’ve basically jeopardised your career and you’re grou

How do you fix the mental health issue with pilots? My understanding is that as soon as you self report you’ve basically jeopardised your career and you’re grounded for a minimum of 6 months while you wait for FAA physicians.

thriftwy 3y ago
Imagine if eyesight or cardiovascular tests depended on self-reporting.
- nradov 3y ago
  Imagine if eyesight or cardiovascular tests were as subjective and unreliable as psychological assessments.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    That and eyesight test may result in glasses, but not in a wholesale ban from the working population. Wife currently works in an institution that caters to mental disorders and system in US mostly sucks ( at least with regular healthcare, you can argue that it works for the well off ).
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      It can be a ban from being a pilot though.
tpmx 3y ago
Current regulations: https://www.faa.gov/pilot-mental-fitness https://www.faa.gov/pilot-mental-fitness The FAA’s regulations require airline pilots to undergo a medical exam with an Aviation Medical Examiner (AME) every six months to five years, depending on the type of flying they do and their age. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-67/subpart-B/section-67.107 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D... Mental standards for a first-class airman medical certificate are:
- antonjs 3y ago
  From what I understand as an observer the FAA rules make it basically impossible for a working pilot to seek mental health care (even for an acute issue like a death in the family), because the potential cost to their career is so high. Isolation and self medication at the hotel bar, here we come.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    Fundamentally, the issue is that the FAA's model of mental health doesn't try to help pilots in distress keep flying; it tries to identify problems and get them out of the sky. So of course pilots will react to that threat to their livelihood (and way-of-life; there's a lot of personal pride wrapped up in the profession) and avoid honesty. Honesty becomes the self-destructive strategy as long as the FAA is willing to use what is discovered in therapy to clip wings. It's a real hard corner they're painted into on this because they ultimately don't know what makes a pilot snap and decide to kill a planeload of trusting passengers.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      The FAA's model definitely provides disincentives against getting help or a diagnosis, and this applies to mental and physical illnesses. I know that some pilots refuse to go to a physician (outside of the FAA-mandated physicals) because one diagnosis, even if it ends up being a false alarm, could ground them, potentially forever. Spend years getting a private pilot certificate, and/or decades working your way up to the airlines--who's going to risk having their family doctor one day say "hmm, that sounds weird..." when listening to your chest?
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Are these easy to cheat? I've found that most diagnoses are easy to produce by first reading the DSM-V criteria and then matching them appropriately to questions asked by doctors. In this case, however, you're trying to avoid diagnosis, which is a slightly different game and seems harder to fake. These appear to be what they're looking for https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-67/subpart-B/section-67.107 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D... If you're getting your Adderall not from prescription, they're not going to know till you tell them, but I wonder if they try anything interesting to find you out. I know at least one person who flew but used Adderall daily for work which means that this sort of thing isn't super rigorous.
wongarsu 3y ago
One option would be to just treat everyone. Every commercial pilot could have to complete 20 hours of therapy a year, with strict confidentiality so they can be open without jeopardizing their career. Or two mandatory hours per month with a psychologist, or whatever scheme works best.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  It's an option, but nobody will be excited about it. There's already a pilot shortage. (20 hours of paid time not flying a plane) x (all the pilots who fly) = a substantial loss of pilot availability. Plus some number of the majority of pilots who are mentally healthy would resent being "forced" to sit through mandatory therapy. They already have to do medicals often enough.
  - srinivgp 3y ago
    > resent Fine, step one, work on why you'd resent that.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      I'll start. Because it feels like being punished for the actions of other people to have my finite time in this universe forced into therapy if I'm a pilot who doesn't need it. Three incidents in the past four decades against 110,000 pilots working daily and not crashing planes because they've had a mental breakdown should not justify the pilot having to give up a whole day a year to talk about their feelings. This is a real challenge for the FAA; they do not like having a variable they can't control, but they also know they don't have a good enough model of mental health to control it yet. I don't envy them the challenge, or they pushback they'll get trying to use their traditional intervention strategies to fix the issue.
      - mikepurvis 3y ago
        A perhaps less conventional intervention could be using starlink or similar to permit remote takeover of flights that appear to be going rogue. Potentially also addresses some hijacking scenarios (though maybe introduces others).
some_random 3y ago
Ultimately this is the consistent problem with the way we deal with mental health problems in general. The solution is to not let it get to crisis levels by proactively addressing problems the same way we deal with physical issues. Imagine if when someone sprained their ankle we demanded they keep walking on it until it rips, and only then do we try to do something about it (ineptly, of course).
thenewwazoo 3y ago
How do you get anyone to take an action that jeopardizes their career? By making their survival not depend upon their career. That may sound glib, but I don't mean it to be. If there's a pilot that is hiding their mental health issues because they'll otherwise risk destitution, that's a problem that's solved by a social safety net. Such a safety net would also solve many other social ills, like people stuck with abusive employers, and so on.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  A lot of pilots like flying planes. A lot of pilots also enjoy ancillary aspects of their career like seeing the world or, notoriously, sex with flight attendants. Telling pilots that, if they open up to a therapist, they can just live on the dole afterwards, is cold comfort.
  - afavour 3y ago
    Sure but if a pilot is contemplating suicide I’m not sure they’re enjoying a whole lot of anything, ancillary to their career or not.
    - genmud 3y ago
      From what I have read in biographies on suicidal people in bands and performers, who show similar traits, they can/do enjoy things... it's just they are constantly looking for "more" and can't really get the easy fulfillment they used to, since it's hard to outperform their career highs. I imagine it's similar with some pilots.
  - pxmpxm 3y ago
    > sex with flight attendants I can't tell whether that is a stereotype or not.
- ohdannyboy 3y ago
  If you're competent enough to be a pilot you're competent enough to make money other ways so it's not destitution. The issue is losing the level of income they make (more than any safety net could pay) and a loss of purpose since most commercial pilots are pilots to the core. Not to mention status and social standing.
ortusdux 3y ago
I was friends with a long-haul pilot that had cancer, and he joked that FAA recertification process was worse than the chemo.
cratermoon 3y ago
Jumping to mental health already? On what basis?
- goostavos 3y ago
  Ill go out on a limb and guess the trying to kill everyone part.
  - junofan 3y ago
    Mass murder seems more the MO of a political protestor.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    I see where you are coming from, but equating mental illness with violent is problematic. The mentally ill are more likely to be victims than perpetrators. They may be over-represented in the judicial system, as a consequence of post-Reagan shift to using jails and prisons to deal with people that formerly would have been under the care of mental health professionals. The following was written in the context of mass shootings, but I believe it applies to this incident and other "trying to kill everyone" incidents. "Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control "won't prevent" another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances. Yet, as we show, notions of mental illness that emerge in relation to mass shootings frequently reflect larger cultural stereotypes and anxieties about matters such as race/ethnicity, social class, and politics. These issues become obscured when mass shootings come to stand in for all gun crime, and when "mentally ill" ceases to be a medical designation and becomes a sign of violent threat." <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25496006/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25496006/>
golergka 3y ago
[flagged]
iterminate 3y ago
edit: not the place to discuss this.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  > Attempting to murder a bunch of people isn't a mental health issue in the traditional sense > need to be in hospital It clearly is a mental health issue. Whether it's a disqualifying, treatable, etc is a valid argument but it is certainly a mental health issue.
  - fzeroracer 3y ago
    Well, no. People commit murder all the time despite being in sound mental being. You could argue that to commit murder requires you to have mental health issues, but that's not always true. But in this scenario and many others there are strong distinctions between people who commit suicide, people who commit murder-suicide and people who commit mass murder-suicide. Understanding that distinction is important because one is a risk to themselves only and another is a risk to others around them. The flaw is of course we bucket all of them the same way for pilots, which leads to the last two stewing and hiding.
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      "Mental health issue" = pathological thinking > there are strong distinctions between people who commit suicide, people who commit murder-suicide and people who commit mass murder-suicide Sure.
    - wenebego 3y ago
      Who are the people committing murder all the time despite being in sound mental being?
      - kayodelycaon 3y ago
        Here's one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing The degrees of accepted violence is cultural. Plenty of people kill out of anger but anger does not make one insane. Unless you defined criminal behavior as mental illness. Also I believe you're misunderstanding what was said, people as a whole, as in humanity, commit all kinds of atrocities. Mental illness is not required to be cruel or callous. Is every soldier mentally ill simply because they are capable of killing on command?
paulddraper 3y ago
> as soon as you self report you’ve basically jeopardised your career and you’re grounded for a minimum of 6 months while you wait for FAA physicians That's best case scenario. For mild depression, you will probably only be out of a job for only several months. For ADHD, you will be out of a job forever. (Commercial airlines, banner towing, freight on Alaskan puddle jumpers...anything) - Yours truly, the Good Guys at the FAA
- alistairSH 3y ago
  Holy crap, ADHD is disqualifying? That's a little surprising, given it's a relatively common diagnosis. Is that due to a side-effect of medication, or simply an inability to juggle the mental demands of being a pilot?
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    If it were side effects, that would be surprising given that the air force provides those same medications to pilots as a performance booster.
    - thrill 3y ago
      Military pilots are only provided performance boosters in special circumstances, not as a general daily event. Such circumstances include long ocean crossings when flying as the only pilot, or in extended combat tempo operations where constant sixteen+ hour days can wear you down. Even when provided such medications it is under the direct care of a flight surgeon who is usually embedded in the flying unit and knows in depth the medical history of each of those pilots. Additionally, pilots are tested in advance of their reactions to such medications so there's less of a surprise when the need for them arises. They're also only issued by the relevant medical authority and voluntarily taken or not taken as the situation dictates.
  - piperswe 3y ago
    IIRC, the medication and the diagnosis are each individual disqualifiers.
LispSporks22 3y ago
You can't even get treatment with drugs for mental health – even for a PPL. e.g. There's only three old depression drugs that are even considered and those come with all kinds FAA caveats and conditions. IMO, there's the stigma, and then there's the FAA discouraging treatment and reporting entirely.
- joezydeco 3y ago
  It's changing, though. There was an FAA rep at OSH'23 that held a forum and admitted they're not prepared to handle an entire generation of young pilots that were exposed to ADHD medications as children. He's working to change the system but it's going to be a while. There have been some small changes here and there. One example is the fast-track change to ADHD history. From first glances you can skip the CogscreenAE if you've been off the meds for 4 years and pass some other criteria. https://www.faa.gov/ame_guide/media/ADHD_fast_track_eval_general_info.pdf https://www.faa.gov/ame_guide/media/ADHD_fast_track_eval_gen...
adolph 3y ago
> wait for FAA physicians Could be worse, like waiting on the FWS.
s1artibartfast 3y ago
Kill collars. If two or three other crew provide the instructions, they could disable another crew
- salawat 3y ago
  Okay. Look. Now you've just introduced an aggravating social factor into the crew population. This is not a recipe for a mentally healthy subpopulation.
naveen99 3y ago
It’s the opposite of standard catch 22. You have to be crazy to self report… if you are not crazy, you don’t have to self report.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  As it happens, this is very close to the original Catch 22: only crazy pilots would voluntarily fly missions during war, and crazy pilots are not allowed to fly, but if you realize that it's crazy to fly, you're obviously not crazy and thus have to fly.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  When the pilot unions where strong they had early pensions for medical reasons, for this very reason.
gavinhoward 3y ago
I'm grounded for life by the FAA due to a history of mental illness. Here's what I would accept: a stipulation/restriction on my medical regarding how often I go to therapy, when, and maybe even giving the therapist power to ground me temporarily. But it would have to apply to only people like me with that restriction. And that's for a history of depression. I don't really deal with clinical depression now. Instead, the FAA wanted me on antidepressants, with all of their side effects, and I could not justify that. My wife has never known me on antidepressants (we met over a year after I got off), and I don't know how it would affect my marriage. But constant therapy and checks? Yeah, I would take that in a heartbeat. I even grounded myself one day after a night where I had to deal with external problems; I wanted to be safe. IOW, the FAA treats me like a problem; I would love if they treated me as a professional, and I would respond in kind, by being the kind of professional they want.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
voisin 3y ago
> How do you fix the mental health issue with pilots? Have the ability for someone on the ground to take over if there is a suspicion of this. Remove the pilot’s ability to disable key systems like in the past examples.

thriftwy 3y ago

Imagine if eyesight or cardiovascular tests depended on self-reporting.

nradov 3y ago
Imagine if eyesight or cardiovascular tests were as subjective and unreliable as psychological assessments.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  That and eyesight test may result in glasses, but not in a wholesale ban from the working population. Wife currently works in an institution that caters to mental disorders and system in US mostly sucks ( at least with regular healthcare, you can argue that it works for the well off ).
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    It can be a ban from being a pilot though.

tpmx 3y ago

Current regulations: https://www.faa.gov/pilot-mental-fitness https://www.faa.gov/pilot-mental-fitness The FAA’s regulations require airline pilots to undergo a medical exam with an Aviation Medical Examiner (AME) every six months to five years, depending on the type of flying they do and their age. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-67/subpart-B/section-67.107 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D... Mental standards for a first-class airman medical certificate are:

antonjs 3y ago
From what I understand as an observer the FAA rules make it basically impossible for a working pilot to seek mental health care (even for an acute issue like a death in the family), because the potential cost to their career is so high. Isolation and self medication at the hotel bar, here we come.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Fundamentally, the issue is that the FAA's model of mental health doesn't try to help pilots in distress keep flying; it tries to identify problems and get them out of the sky. So of course pilots will react to that threat to their livelihood (and way-of-life; there's a lot of personal pride wrapped up in the profession) and avoid honesty. Honesty becomes the self-destructive strategy as long as the FAA is willing to use what is discovered in therapy to clip wings. It's a real hard corner they're painted into on this because they ultimately don't know what makes a pilot snap and decide to kill a planeload of trusting passengers.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    The FAA's model definitely provides disincentives against getting help or a diagnosis, and this applies to mental and physical illnesses. I know that some pilots refuse to go to a physician (outside of the FAA-mandated physicals) because one diagnosis, even if it ends up being a false alarm, could ground them, potentially forever. Spend years getting a private pilot certificate, and/or decades working your way up to the airlines--who's going to risk having their family doctor one day say "hmm, that sounds weird..." when listening to your chest?
renewiltord 3y ago
Are these easy to cheat? I've found that most diagnoses are easy to produce by first reading the DSM-V criteria and then matching them appropriately to questions asked by doctors. In this case, however, you're trying to avoid diagnosis, which is a slightly different game and seems harder to fake. These appear to be what they're looking for https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-67/subpart-B/section-67.107 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D... If you're getting your Adderall not from prescription, they're not going to know till you tell them, but I wonder if they try anything interesting to find you out. I know at least one person who flew but used Adderall daily for work which means that this sort of thing isn't super rigorous.

wongarsu 3y ago

One option would be to just treat everyone. Every commercial pilot could have to complete 20 hours of therapy a year, with strict confidentiality so they can be open without jeopardizing their career. Or two mandatory hours per month with a psychologist, or whatever scheme works best.

SoftTalker 3y ago
It's an option, but nobody will be excited about it. There's already a pilot shortage. (20 hours of paid time not flying a plane) x (all the pilots who fly) = a substantial loss of pilot availability. Plus some number of the majority of pilots who are mentally healthy would resent being "forced" to sit through mandatory therapy. They already have to do medicals often enough.
- srinivgp 3y ago
  > resent Fine, step one, work on why you'd resent that.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    I'll start. Because it feels like being punished for the actions of other people to have my finite time in this universe forced into therapy if I'm a pilot who doesn't need it. Three incidents in the past four decades against 110,000 pilots working daily and not crashing planes because they've had a mental breakdown should not justify the pilot having to give up a whole day a year to talk about their feelings. This is a real challenge for the FAA; they do not like having a variable they can't control, but they also know they don't have a good enough model of mental health to control it yet. I don't envy them the challenge, or they pushback they'll get trying to use their traditional intervention strategies to fix the issue.
    - mikepurvis 3y ago
      A perhaps less conventional intervention could be using starlink or similar to permit remote takeover of flights that appear to be going rogue. Potentially also addresses some hijacking scenarios (though maybe introduces others).

some_random 3y ago

Ultimately this is the consistent problem with the way we deal with mental health problems in general. The solution is to not let it get to crisis levels by proactively addressing problems the same way we deal with physical issues. Imagine if when someone sprained their ankle we demanded they keep walking on it until it rips, and only then do we try to do something about it (ineptly, of course).

thenewwazoo 3y ago

How do you get anyone to take an action that jeopardizes their career? By making their survival not depend upon their career. That may sound glib, but I don't mean it to be. If there's a pilot that is hiding their mental health issues because they'll otherwise risk destitution, that's a problem that's solved by a social safety net. Such a safety net would also solve many other social ills, like people stuck with abusive employers, and so on.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
A lot of pilots like flying planes. A lot of pilots also enjoy ancillary aspects of their career like seeing the world or, notoriously, sex with flight attendants. Telling pilots that, if they open up to a therapist, they can just live on the dole afterwards, is cold comfort.
- afavour 3y ago
  Sure but if a pilot is contemplating suicide I’m not sure they’re enjoying a whole lot of anything, ancillary to their career or not.
  - genmud 3y ago
    From what I have read in biographies on suicidal people in bands and performers, who show similar traits, they can/do enjoy things... it's just they are constantly looking for "more" and can't really get the easy fulfillment they used to, since it's hard to outperform their career highs. I imagine it's similar with some pilots.
- pxmpxm 3y ago
  > sex with flight attendants I can't tell whether that is a stereotype or not.
ohdannyboy 3y ago
If you're competent enough to be a pilot you're competent enough to make money other ways so it's not destitution. The issue is losing the level of income they make (more than any safety net could pay) and a loss of purpose since most commercial pilots are pilots to the core. Not to mention status and social standing.

ortusdux 3y ago

I was friends with a long-haul pilot that had cancer, and he joked that FAA recertification process was worse than the chemo.

cratermoon 3y ago

Jumping to mental health already? On what basis?

goostavos 3y ago
Ill go out on a limb and guess the trying to kill everyone part.
- junofan 3y ago
  Mass murder seems more the MO of a political protestor.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  I see where you are coming from, but equating mental illness with violent is problematic. The mentally ill are more likely to be victims than perpetrators. They may be over-represented in the judicial system, as a consequence of post-Reagan shift to using jails and prisons to deal with people that formerly would have been under the care of mental health professionals. The following was written in the context of mass shootings, but I believe it applies to this incident and other "trying to kill everyone" incidents. "Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control "won't prevent" another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances. Yet, as we show, notions of mental illness that emerge in relation to mass shootings frequently reflect larger cultural stereotypes and anxieties about matters such as race/ethnicity, social class, and politics. These issues become obscured when mass shootings come to stand in for all gun crime, and when "mentally ill" ceases to be a medical designation and becomes a sign of violent threat." <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25496006/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25496006/>

golergka 3y ago

[flagged]

iterminate 3y ago

edit: not the place to discuss this.

paulddraper 3y ago
> Attempting to murder a bunch of people isn't a mental health issue in the traditional sense > need to be in hospital It clearly is a mental health issue. Whether it's a disqualifying, treatable, etc is a valid argument but it is certainly a mental health issue.
- fzeroracer 3y ago
  Well, no. People commit murder all the time despite being in sound mental being. You could argue that to commit murder requires you to have mental health issues, but that's not always true. But in this scenario and many others there are strong distinctions between people who commit suicide, people who commit murder-suicide and people who commit mass murder-suicide. Understanding that distinction is important because one is a risk to themselves only and another is a risk to others around them. The flaw is of course we bucket all of them the same way for pilots, which leads to the last two stewing and hiding.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    "Mental health issue" = pathological thinking > there are strong distinctions between people who commit suicide, people who commit murder-suicide and people who commit mass murder-suicide Sure.
  - wenebego 3y ago
    Who are the people committing murder all the time despite being in sound mental being?
    - kayodelycaon 3y ago
      Here's one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing The degrees of accepted violence is cultural. Plenty of people kill out of anger but anger does not make one insane. Unless you defined criminal behavior as mental illness. Also I believe you're misunderstanding what was said, people as a whole, as in humanity, commit all kinds of atrocities. Mental illness is not required to be cruel or callous. Is every soldier mentally ill simply because they are capable of killing on command?

paulddraper 3y ago

> as soon as you self report you’ve basically jeopardised your career and you’re grounded for a minimum of 6 months while you wait for FAA physicians That's best case scenario. For mild depression, you will probably only be out of a job for only several months. For ADHD, you will be out of a job forever. (Commercial airlines, banner towing, freight on Alaskan puddle jumpers...anything) - Yours truly, the Good Guys at the FAA

alistairSH 3y ago
Holy crap, ADHD is disqualifying? That's a little surprising, given it's a relatively common diagnosis. Is that due to a side-effect of medication, or simply an inability to juggle the mental demands of being a pilot?
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  If it were side effects, that would be surprising given that the air force provides those same medications to pilots as a performance booster.
  - thrill 3y ago
    Military pilots are only provided performance boosters in special circumstances, not as a general daily event. Such circumstances include long ocean crossings when flying as the only pilot, or in extended combat tempo operations where constant sixteen+ hour days can wear you down. Even when provided such medications it is under the direct care of a flight surgeon who is usually embedded in the flying unit and knows in depth the medical history of each of those pilots. Additionally, pilots are tested in advance of their reactions to such medications so there's less of a surprise when the need for them arises. They're also only issued by the relevant medical authority and voluntarily taken or not taken as the situation dictates.
- piperswe 3y ago
  IIRC, the medication and the diagnosis are each individual disqualifiers.

LispSporks22 3y ago

You can't even get treatment with drugs for mental health – even for a PPL. e.g. There's only three old depression drugs that are even considered and those come with all kinds FAA caveats and conditions. IMO, there's the stigma, and then there's the FAA discouraging treatment and reporting entirely.

joezydeco 3y ago
It's changing, though. There was an FAA rep at OSH'23 that held a forum and admitted they're not prepared to handle an entire generation of young pilots that were exposed to ADHD medications as children. He's working to change the system but it's going to be a while. There have been some small changes here and there. One example is the fast-track change to ADHD history. From first glances you can skip the CogscreenAE if you've been off the meds for 4 years and pass some other criteria. https://www.faa.gov/ame_guide/media/ADHD_fast_track_eval_general_info.pdf https://www.faa.gov/ame_guide/media/ADHD_fast_track_eval_gen...

adolph 3y ago

> wait for FAA physicians Could be worse, like waiting on the FWS.

s1artibartfast 3y ago

Kill collars. If two or three other crew provide the instructions, they could disable another crew

salawat 3y ago
Okay. Look. Now you've just introduced an aggravating social factor into the crew population. This is not a recipe for a mentally healthy subpopulation.

naveen99 3y ago

It’s the opposite of standard catch 22. You have to be crazy to self report… if you are not crazy, you don’t have to self report.

resolutebat 3y ago
As it happens, this is very close to the original Catch 22: only crazy pilots would voluntarily fly missions during war, and crazy pilots are not allowed to fly, but if you realize that it's crazy to fly, you're obviously not crazy and thus have to fly.
rightbyte 3y ago
When the pilot unions where strong they had early pensions for medical reasons, for this very reason.

gavinhoward 3y ago

I'm grounded for life by the FAA due to a history of mental illness. Here's what I would accept: a stipulation/restriction on my medical regarding how often I go to therapy, when, and maybe even giving the therapist power to ground me temporarily. But it would have to apply to only people like me with that restriction. And that's for a history of depression. I don't really deal with clinical depression now. Instead, the FAA wanted me on antidepressants, with all of their side effects, and I could not justify that. My wife has never known me on antidepressants (we met over a year after I got off), and I don't know how it would affect my marriage. But constant therapy and checks? Yeah, I would take that in a heartbeat. I even grounded myself one day after a night where I had to deal with external problems; I wanted to be safe. IOW, the FAA treats me like a problem; I would love if they treated me as a professional, and I would respond in kind, by being the kind of professional they want.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

voisin 3y ago

> How do you fix the mental health issue with pilots? Have the ability for someone on the ground to take over if there is a suspicion of this. Remove the pilot’s ability to disable key systems like in the past examples.