Great article, but unfortunately the lying is entrenched culturally. The regulator is so distrusted it can never change.
For example in Australia I’ve heard multiple cases of somebody proactively seeking counselling for help dealing with temporarily stressful situations such as divorce, then being grounded at work, and the regulator (CASA) denying medical clearances. This increases the stress.
Every time some senior person proclaims “it’s okay this time - report your illnesses”, it never is, and we go around this circle again and again. I will personally never report my medical history accurately to the regulator.
This sounds like learned helplessness. Of course there is something they can do. There are a lot of things they can do to become better.
The medical profession is almost unrecognizable from what it was in the 1950s. My grandfather (MD) said as much 15 years ago before passing away. It has only changed more since then. The FAA’s policies are based on 1950s medical knowledge and opinions.
If you spend any significant time in online aviation circles, medical issues come up daily. People who had a diagnosis of ADHD as a kid (when getting diagnosed with it was all the rage) have to jump through insane hoops if they disclose that on their FAA medical. Meanwhile, existing pilots often avoid going to a doctor or seeking help when they need it because of the possibility of losing their source of income, temporarily or maybe even permanently.
So, in many situations, instead of having healthy pilots, we have unhealthy pilots. The policy sometimes has the complete opposite effect of its intended purpose.
> People who had a diagnosis of ADHD as a kid (when getting diagnosed with it was all the rage) have to jump through insane hoops if they disclose that on their FAA medical.
The FAA could change this instantly by simply abandoning their “have you ever” language and focusing on whether or not the pilot currently requires medication for a condition.
The government just loves those “have you ever” questions, though, as you know if you’ve ever applied for a clearance or gone through the immigration process. So they probably aren’t going away.
It can change. The regulator could start doing positive examples of temporary grounding and supporting the pilot. There are all kind of active actions the regulator could take that would change things over a few decades.
But first the regulator need to take action and keep doing it.
I briefly held a student pilots license, issued my exemption, due to kidney stones. I have suffered from depression for years and was extremely reluctant to seek treatment because I knew it would be detrimental to flying.
My primary care doctor had me try lexapro in 2018 and even though I hadn't flown in 2 years I protested but reluctantly agreed I needed to do something and it was unlikely I would ever fly as a private pilot for many factors and should go on with treatment.
I know for a fact pilots hide all kinds of medical issues. I had a doctor that worked with delta pilots and argued my case with the FAA (a formality more than anything) and he along with everyone at flight school advocated for keeping my kidney stones to myself and not disclosing it in the first place.
The system needs some work. I have first hand experience with it without my livelihood being on the line and its easy to imagine why pilots hide issues.
The situation has improved dramatically in the part 91 world. If you received a 3rd class (including special issuance) within the past 10 years you can likely now do BasicMed as long as your condition is well managed. Might be worth looking into before the 10 year limit expires.
If they already have a non-revoked 3rd class from before, though, having used one not on this list may not prevent getting BasicMed. Even if you’re technically eligible for an SI you should just do BasicMed and not risk it if you don’t have to. Disclaimer: not an AME, YMMV.
This is clearly false. The limitations on BasicMed are different from those of a standard medical certificate [0], and have to do with your physician's medical opinion about your ability to operate a plane. There are a few conditions that specifically require a new SI [1] but this is not some pseudo-legal/badfaith game.
Admiral Cloudberg (Kyra Dempsey) writes detailed, thoughtful analyses of airline disasters. In many cases, subsequent improvements have made a disaster type unlikely to recur. This one (the suicide/mass murder of Andreas Lubitz on Germanwings flight 9525) is an exception, and the article makes a strong case that significant changes are needed but are not being pursued. The archive is full of fascinating, riveting accounts of what happened, why, and how for many different tragedies.
> In the aftermath of the crash, experts proposed various measures intended to reduce the risk of pilot suicide, including a rule that there must be two crewmembers in the cockpit at all times. …] Shortly after the crash of flight 9525, the European Aviation Safety Agency began encouraging the policy in Europe in order to gather data about its effectiveness, but after the trial period was over, the results were not encouraging. […] the policy leaves the cockpit door open for longer periods of time, increasing the risk of hijackings, which historically have been much more common than pilot suicides anyway.
This seems to be the crux of the matter.
I’ve seen it argued that the only sensible post-9/11 security measure was reinforcing the cockpit door. Extra screenings, shoes off, no liquids - all this seems secondary at best, security theatre at worst, when compared to denying an adversary control of an airplane.
Having said that, I’ve also heard the theory advanced that even a reinforced door isn’t needed: passengers mental models have shifted from compliance to active resistance, and 9/11 may be impossible to repeat as a result.
If this is the crux of the matter you took away from this, you probably missed the point by a lot...
Can i recommend a rereading of the last 3 part, the one about medical conditions killing pilots careers and how it incentivise them to hide a lot of conditions?
Pilot suicides leading to death of flyers is incredibly rare, as even the article indicates. But I’m not qualified to say what impact an intervention - even one that appears outwardly positive - could have.
Great report! But I missed some discussion on the role workplace bullying may have contributed to mental deterioration of the pilot. At time of the crash, I remember reading some reports he was mocked by colleagues due to working as a flight attendant before becoming a pilot. IIRC they even nicknamed him "Tomato Andy", after the red uniform of flight attendants used by the company.
Not merely suicide; SSRIs, antipsychotics, and other psychotropic medications carry a high risk of increased incidences of homicide.
This has been known at least since Charles Whitman packed his trusty Dexedrine while shooting up U Texas in 1966, and all the Columbine kids were heavily medicated, as is likely for other "mentally troubled" mass shooters before and since.
The medications responsible for this used to carry appropriate black-box warnings, but since it was a bad PR move, the FDA permitted them to remove it.
Sounds like an ethics problem more than a regulatory system problem. The long term solution
is not reducing the incentive to lie, it's better and more extensive moral education to increase personal reluctance to lie. Why is that the better solution? Because it has profound benefits that extend far beyond this specific scenario / industry.
Would you withhold your medical information from your employer for hundreds of thousands of dollars? Because that’s what’s happening here. A pilot career can cost more than $100k in training and years of doing work for what basically amounts to minimum wage. At the end of it you end up with a skill set that is very valuable, but not very transferable to other careers.
So let’s reframe it as: should we expect people to tell the truth about things that mostly don’t matter at a personal cost of their entire career, and all training costs?
If you disclose, you are punished severely and may never go to work again with almost no recourse by a system which largely ignores medical science. If you withhold, as almost all pilots are advised by colleagues and the doctors themselves to do, nothing happens. (When I went for an aviation medical, the doctor said: I’m not your family doctor, only answer the question I asked. If I need more information I can ask for it)
When faced by a system so perverse is it really all that unethical.
Ethics is not reducible to "learning not to lie." There's also "not using sweeping generalizations to dramatically affect individual's lives" and "using authority the way it was intended instead of shrinking from the responsibility granted by the will of the people" and a whole other host of ethical issues that apply to the various aeronautical administrations.
Brainwashing alone does not an ethical system make. You generally have to act ethically in order to teach other people to do the same.
Exactly (re: your last sentence), which is a very big part of why you should not lie. It is no good to say "well, the system / another person did something bad, so I get to do something bad also". You have to take responsibility and do the right thing anyway. That is the whole heart and essence of ethics. Without people who are willing to do that, everything quickly goes down the drain in a filthy spiral of degradation.
One solution could be to provide a largish tool to open the door, and place the tool all the way aft. A hijacker would have to run a gauntlet of all the passengers to retrieve the obvious tool, passengers who know they have to stop him.
It's impossible to eliminate all possibility of a crazy person doing massive harm. The kind of regulation that would require would be intolerable to civilized society.
Sometimes these things happen, it's almost like a random mechanical failure that takes down an airplane.
Maybe one day when we get AI good enough to fly an airplane on its own we can eliminate that. Assuming that such an AI is 100% predictable and reliable and isn't subject to psychosis or hallucinations, which may or may not be achievable.
The problem that prevented any solutions was the reinforced door. The security theatre was worse than theatre--it backfired.
At this point, the flight crews are a bigger threat to passengers than terrorists. Since passengers won't sit still for a hijacking anymore, terrorists effectively aren't a threat.
You don't need a heavily reinforced door. You only need one that prevents entry for a few seconds while the passengers figure out that they need to subdue the attacker.
Yes that's true, but in this case only because Lubitz chose to use the autopilot to make a controlled descent into the mountains. He could have put the aircraft into an unrecoverable nosedive while the captain was in the lavatory, and saving it would have been impossible even if the captain had been able to get back into the cockpit.
That is also true, but most people committing suicide like this want an audience. Otherwise, they'd simply do it alone. Many times they kind of even want someone to stop them. That gives you time.
We could have changed nothing after 9/11 and it couldn't have been repeated. The fourth plane is an example of that.
For example in Australia I’ve heard multiple cases of somebody proactively seeking counselling for help dealing with temporarily stressful situations such as divorce, then being grounded at work, and the regulator (CASA) denying medical clearances. This increases the stress.
Every time some senior person proclaims “it’s okay this time - report your illnesses”, it never is, and we go around this circle again and again. I will personally never report my medical history accurately to the regulator.