That's worse than it being out in the open.
Just because the punishment for seeking mental health care is losing one’s entire career doesn’t make these problems disappear, it just makes everyone very good at masking or self medicating.
this is a very good point - only vulnerability is a person decompensates from "able to mask" to "lets gooooo" in a very short period of time - between two flights say - then we're gonna have some problems
It is hard for some people to have the emotional maturity to understand this, but we can't fucking prevent every fucking death. We will all fucking die sooner or later, too.
You have absolutely no objective reason to suppose that changing this policy would have prevented this, not to mention the risk of making things worse.
I can keep an old decrepit rich guy living a miserable life for some more 6 months at the same cost that would take to me to improve the life expectancy of some 100 poor babies a few decades.
I can try save a bunch of fat very-sick boomers from a respiratory infection at the cost of causing an economic crisis that will completely fuck a lot of young people too for decades ahead. Was it fucking worth?
In this case, "lots" is "anything more than once a month" because footage of the above is addictive to anyone trying to make money from the news. Look at how many flights there are a day. How high can the crash rate be until those pictures are seared into our eyeballs?
It's actually funny you bring up COVID, because I agree with you that the restrictions were... not good. I also think that the FAA could use a lighter touch on just about everything, EXCEPT the level of safety it requires from Part 121 operators.
Looking at the list of crashes >200 deaths since 2010, it seems to be about 50% pilot suicide.
A man could go for a routine physical one fine day, feeling like a million dollars, and be grounded for fallen arches. It happened!—just like that! (And try raising them.) Or for breaking his wrist and losing only part of its mobility. Or for a minor deterioration of eyesight, or for any of hundreds of reasons that would make no difference to a man in an ordinary occupation. As a result all fighter jocks began looking upon doctors as their natural enemies. Going to see a flight surgeon was a no-gain proposition.It always baffles me how blasé people are about driving safety. The rules for driving aren't even that hard to follow. Yet people just seem constitutionally unable to do so.
One of the all-time great seasons of television.
(her vid on it https://youtu.be/eu-T7P3o6tU)
In general, this principle works for lots of things. Drug use at your office job? No problem so long as I can’t tell you’re on drugs. And so on and so forth.
The alternative isn’t some clean job. It’s where people who are incredibly stupid and scatterbrained have a “reasonable accommodation” and then you’re on a plane run by a fucking moron so that when the other competent pilot falls ill the moron will have to fly it by himself and then you all die.
You thought you had 2x redundancy? Well one of the machines was always failing. No thanks. Let’s keep doing what we’re doing.
They do have to pass quite strict tests to be a commercial pilot. Also the airlines/insurers are not keen on morons crashing their $100m aircraft.
But some people couldn't answer them and so they got paid out. When the system is opaque we can preserve competence. If we have to "make reasonable accommodations" and "prevent disparate impact" we're going to be in trouble. Better to keep it quiet.
The government that had to pay out because people couldn't answer that question was also keen on not paying out lawsuits. But they had to nonetheless.
csense•2mo ago
If the provider doesn't know you're a pilot -- or even your real name -- they can't report you.