Pilots hide mental health problems so they don't lose their licenses
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They are starting to reduce some of the strict requirements and encumbrances placed on Pilots such as this because of the shortages.
I'm in the unfortunate position of having a DWI from 2009 and have been told by multiple people in the industry that would hinder my career prospects as a pilot. Essentially, I've got no shot at getting hired by American or any other major airline because of something stupid I did when I was in college 14 years ago.
I don't have a drinking problem and am a completely different person. It sucks.
Your story is not uncommon. The general wisdom on DWIs is that yes it does hurt your chances of getting into airlines, but if it was (1) minor/borderline, (2) a long time ago, and (3) you have shown a pattern of recovery, it is not a career ender.
Also looking at helicopter/flight medic but for now I am starting back to school in January to finish my AAS in Cybersecurity followed by BS in CS.
In Estonia, no matter how horrific the crime, your record gets wiped after 7 years since you finished serving the sentence (got out of prison / probation ended / paid a fine), allowing for people to move on with their lives.
Especially if you’re a corrupt politician, child abuser etc. it’s really helpful for that sort of people. Not so much for everyone else, but why would that ever be an issue?
Criminal records don’t exist just to punish people and penalize them for the rest of their lives but also to inform other what those people are capable of. Expungement should only be possible for non-serious crimes and/or on a case by case basis
I looked into getting my record cleaned up/sealed with my attorney and it all just sounded very... expensive.
I know you're not defending the point. I'm just saying.
And that's also why the newspapers will generally write that "a 27-year old from X" did this and that instead of using a full name. People widely known for a crime by their full name can apply to change their name at some point.
Deport where? Could you please provide us more info?
So if someone is committing crimes every 3 or 4 years, the previous records show to reflect ongoing behaviour type, but if you have 7 'clear' years then all is wiped.
After 7 years of no more VAC/game bans the previous ones disappear.
Though possibly Valve handles it differently for first party games, this was for Modern Warfare 2.
There is the caveat though that names are allowed to be published in some cases of more severe crime, so in cases like murder an employer might still be able to find out about it with a google search.
I wanted to be a pilot but am tall (> 6 feet) and poor eye sight (< -10).
I was told at a young age that it would be nearly impossible for me. I accepted my fate for better or worse. Yet you have a better chance than me. Hard to say if it’s worth pursuing.
Nevertheless, I sympathize with you because people can make big mistakes and learn from it but the categorization and stigma remains.
Best of luck to you.
I've wondered if flying private would be any different. I don't "NEED" to work for AA.
I’m not trying to go woke here, there are disabilities that prevent performing certain tasks such as flying (total blindness or colour blindness) but there are others which are easily worked around.
As for eyesight, I'd imagine it's for the case when the pilot loses/breaks/forgets their glasses. You don't want a pilot who suddenly can't see in midair.
And there's a ton of ways a pilot can become incapacitated. Having an extra pair of glasses is one of the easiest mitigations around, if the odds are actually that bad.
It’s also not about “enough space” in the entire cockpit, it’s about the layouts of all of the controls and being able to reach them.
“Extra pair of glasses” is not a solution in severe turbulence where the plane drops 100ft in 1 second.
It's the fault of airlines. Nitpicking is fine if you want to add more details but doesn't change that.
And taller people on average can reach more controls, not less.
For glasses, how often does that make them come off compared to any other random reason for incapacitation? And what if there's a strap trying to keep them on? Acting like this is the only risk factor in isolation is bad.
Airliners are good at fitting 99%+ of the population well. But, in the end, airliner cockpits have switches and indicators up "high" and stuff down low that has to be easily within reach, but also not crowd your movement. There's a lot of adjustability, but adjustability (seat rails, etc) has been causes of accidents.
If you're within 5'2 to 6'3, odds are you can easily clamber in, fit, reach all the controls. That's all that's required. Even if you're outside of that range it might be OK (there is a 4'11 787 captain out there...)
As to glasses, there's no problem with having poor vision if it can be corrected with lenses. Aviation is not perfectly inclusive or accommodating of every disability, but it's not needlessly restrictive, either.
But there is a pretty big difference between accommodating 93 percentile for men and 99.96 percentile, and that's only 5 inches in height between 6'1" and 6'6".
You know that how exactly?
Maybe that the case but if it’s not maximizing safety and minimizing failure risk (so by extension any unnecessary complexity) should be prioritized over any accessibility concerns under any circumstances
Under the ADA "there simply isn't a wheelchair ramp up to our building" isn't a legitimate restriction on hiring someone who uses a wheelchair—you put a wheelchair ramp in.
OP's point is that arguably the same should apply to other traits like height. The space constraints are somewhat arbitrary and could be remedied.
And someone else already replied saying the ADA forces new buildings to comply. So if we did that with planes in this comparison, new models would fit more people out of the factory. Would have done so for decades.
Again, if reasonable to comply. Say I am building a new building on steep terrain where in order to get a compliant wheelchair ramp in with the maximum allowed grade that it can be, and all the appropriate flat spots for it. Let's say that wheelchair ramp would occupy 3/4ths of the whole property, making it impossible to build a code-compliant building on that property. The only alternative would be to purchase adjacent property but the owners refuse to sell. It can then be argued that making the new building wheelchair accessible is impossible without undue burden on the owner of the property.
In fact, this sort of thing is _explicitly_ called out in 28 CFR 35.151:
"(i) Full compliance with the requirements of this section is not required where a public entity can demonstrate that it is structurally impracticable to meet the requirements. Full compliance will be considered structurally impracticable only in those rare circumstances when the unique characteristics of terrain prevent the incorporation of accessibility features."
You also only need to provide accommodations for places the public accesses. A mechanical walkway that is only used by maintenance workers, for example, need not be accessible. Incidentally, airplane cockpits are pretty much a textbook example of 'not public space' and thus are also not subject to accessibility requirements.
Point is, the ADA is not as black and white as many perceive it to be.
And for employee areas you [should] still need a good reason to make an area that restricts your hiring capabilities.
Right, but they were designed that way. It was likely known at design time that there was a maximum height.
Standard bathroom stalls won't fit wheelchairs, but that doesn't absolve companies from a duty to provide ones that are.
There are obviously different physical constraints here than bathrooms, but I'd be surprised if there was a physical constraint limiting this.
As for the eyesight, this strikes me as the kind of things copilots and backup glasses are for. Require every pilot with glasses to carry a backup pair in their shirt pocket. Or maybe contacts in and a pair of glasses (turbulence may be an issue with glasses).
I'd be curious if they're equally cautious with people who are diabetic or have cardiac risk factors.
Airplane cockpits aren't built the way they are for shiggles. Pilots need to be able to reach controls, and if you design a cockpit for fitting people over 6ft tall, it might become unergonomic, if not downright dangerous for shorter pilots. There are actual safety issues at play here.
Similar for eyesight -- yes they can carry a backup, until they forget it. The safest thing is to require pilots to have adequate uncorrected vision, though some are loosening that to allow lenses. Do you want to fly on an airplane where there's a nonzero chance the pilot is effectively incapacitated because he forgot his glasses?
> I'd be curious if they're equally cautious with people who are diabetic or have cardiac risk factors.
To different degrees, but yes, they are. Some airlines will require their pilots to get regular medical checkups.
If they can build a thin metal tube that can safely ascend and descend 30k feet, I'm pretty sure they can build controls that are ergonomic for people outside of a 6" height span. Of all the issues airplane engineers face, I refuse to believe that adjustable controls are the one hill they can't conquer.
> Similar for eyesight -- yes they can carry a backup, until they forget it.
This is how practically every part of the plane is. There are redundant parts, until maintenance forgets about it. Except here there's a redundancy of a redundancy; the copilot can take over if the other pilot forgot their backup glasses and their contacts broke or whatever.
Just put it on the pre-flight checklist. If it's good enough for the mechanical parts, it should be good enough for an already-redundant piece of human equipment.
> Do you want to fly on an airplane where there's a nonzero chance the pilot is effectively incapacitated because he forgot his glasses?
Every flight you get on has a non-zero chance of a pilot being incapacitated. That's why there are two. Heart attacks, sudden onset of a seizure disorder, bad medication interactions, etc, etc. There are dozens of reasons why a pilot could be incapacitated mid-air.
If my options are a pilot with glasses or a pilot with high blood pressure, I'm taking the glasses. An effectively blind pilot doesn't cause a distraction, and could be helpful to their copilot (doing radio comms, talking to passengers, maybe watching a gauge or two if they squint). A pilot in cardiac arrest is both incapable of helping and distracting.
I wouldn't worry that much about a pilot with glasses. The glasses are unlikely to spontaneously break, if they do they should have backups, if they don't have backups then the copilot takes over like anything else that incapacitates a pilot. Hell, if it really came down to the wire, there's probably a decent chance that one of the passengers on the plane has a prescription close enough to make a shoddy landing.
How many accidents have there been before we figured out the edge cases with doing this? How many planes _still_ crash due to metal fatigue from pressurization cycles? How many souls are you willing to sacrifice for adjustable controls?
> This is how practically every part of the plane is. There are redundant parts, until maintenance forgets about it.
And just like when maintenance forgets it and there's an incident, it's a big deal. Why accept that risk when there's an easy way to avoid it, especially with potentially hundreds of souls onboard?
> Except here there's a redundancy of a redundancy; the copilot can take over if the other pilot forgot their backup glasses and their contacts broke or whatever.
A copilot is not a redundancy, they're a partial backup. Usually the pilot/copilot split responsibilities. If you push all that onto one person, there are some tasks that they will be less efficient at, if not incapable of performing at all. Yes, most modern airlines can probably be successfully flown by just one pilot, but that pilot is going to have an increased cognitive load to deal with which may reduce their efficiency. In an emergency situation, this can especially be dangerous.
The mantra is "aviate, navigate, communicate" -- when those are split up between two pilots, all three can be accomplished at the same time. When you only have one pilot, something ends up suffering. Hopefully it's just the 'communicate' aspect, but we know in reality it's most often all three that suffer.
Plus the copilot is a human too. Most humans will be a little distracted if the guy they were were working with for the last few hours suddenly died or had a debilitating injury next to them.
> Just put it on the pre-flight checklist. If it's good enough for the mechanical parts, it should be good enough for an already-redundant piece of human equipment.
You'd also need to ensure that the glasses are in good working order, are still the correct prescription..etc. It would not be as simple as 'make sure pilot has extra pair of glasses'.
> If my options are a pilot with glasses or a pilot with high blood pressure, I'm taking the glasses. An effectively blind pilot doesn't cause a distraction, and could be helpful to their copilot (doing radio comms, talking to passengers, maybe watching a gauge or two if they squint). A pilot in cardiac arrest is both incapable of helping and distracting.
Which is incidentally why a lot of pilots are checked for the latter as well. Airlines definitely do require physical checkups for pilots, and that includes cardiovascular health.
> I wouldn't worry that much about a pilot with glasses. The glasses are unlikely to spontaneously break, if they do they should have backups, if they don't have backups then the copilot takes over like anything else that incapacitates a pilot. Hell, if it really came down to the wire, there's probably a decent chance that one of the passengers on the plane has a prescription close enough to make a shoddy landing.
Many, many aviation safety regulations are for edge cases that were written and proved in blood. You do not want your aviation safety regulations to be the equivalent of an italian mechanic going "itsa good!"
They now work at NASA but have had to fight tooth and nail to go on longer expeditions related to search and rescue and it's really only the advent of CGM that have made it possible, to be honest.
Found this as well after a quick Google search; the first medical approval of someone with Type 1 Diabetes by the FAA was 2020: https://beyondtype1.org/commercial-pilot-diabetes/
On the other hand, I do tell people that a well managed diabetes still lets you do most anything, so I'll reflect on the commercial flying where I think one shouldn't.
Why take any unnecessary risks at all? If you can’t have your eyesight repaired surgical well… tough luck there are many other careers you can pursue.
> they're equally cautious with people who are diabetic or have cardiac risk factors
Yes of course they are. Which again seems perfectly reasonable
Height or correctable vision can still be disqualifying for military aviators (my vision was disqualifying from flying pointy military jets at the time and might still be).
You can call AMAS (Aviation Medicine Advisory Service) for an opinion.
But ultimately you'll discuss your situation with an AME when applying for a medical certificate, including whether you're best off with 3rd class now and 1st class later. Or just aiming for 1st class right away.
I think the structure of the pilot market is such that tightening of voluntary restrictions is unlikely.
An estimated 1/4 of all registered sex offenders were minors at the time that they became offenders. The single year of your life when you're most likely to become one is 14.
There are a lot of horror stories like a guy whose 13 year old girlfriend send him a nude photo, her parents found out and reported it, and now he can't live within a certain distance of an elementary school for the rest of his life.
Yeah, if a 24 year old man has pictures of a 13 year old, that's a problem. But a 14 year old boy having pictures of a 13 year old girl?
As a society, we really don't believe in forgiveness.
It’s not about forgiveness, it’s about minimizing future harm. If you are an actual (and there should be a sufficiently high bar for that) convicted child abuser you should never be allowed to be employed in any job which allows you to have authority over children etc. in such cases “forgiveness” would certainly be against the public interest.
But that's not the way that the law is written.
They aren't in a category called juvenile sex offenders. They are simply registered sex offenders. For the rest of their lives. Randomly punished forever for doing normal stupid kid things.
https://jlc.org/issues/juvenile-sex-offender-registry-sorna estimates this at about 200,000 unlucky people.
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-madness-in-our-metho...
>the only solution was to ease off the medication
> With help from his psychiatrist, Lubitz was eventually able to end treatment, and in July 2009 he was declared fully recovered.
> After applying again, the Lufthansa aeromedical center decided to issue him a new medical certificate, but with strings attached: if he ever again suffered from depression, the document said, the certificate would immediately become invalid.
Amazing. They basically got a severely depressed patient off his medication and told him they would ruin his childhood dream of flying should he ever suffer and seek treatment again. And then allowed him to fly a plane.
There's a whole generation of students that got diagnoses and/or medication in their younger years. Having any of that in your medical record puts you in the same category as the pilots mentioned in this article. Even if you've been off the Adderall for years, it's a mandatory psych eval and cognitive testing. Thousands of dollars in testing and a long wait for an FAA decision.
There's been some recent changes, including a new "fast track" to approval if you've been off meds for four years or longer. But there's still paperwork. And the decision is far from guaranteed.
Apparently the FAA is acutely aware of this, in light of a growing shortage of pilots in the pipeline and huge demand from the airlines. It would be more reasonable to use the recommendations of your local CFI and flight school to decide if you have the cognitive skills to fly solo, compared to a neuropsychologist sitting in an office. Hopefully this begins to change soon.
What's really ironic is that once you've passed the certification and are sitting in the cockpit, you can have all the caffeine you want. But time-release ADHD medications are a no-no.
Conversely, I have to declare the fact I was treated for medical health at specific military hospital to obtain medical certificate to be presented at the drafting installations. I have to do this for three years until they decided not to bother drafting me and certified that I participated in the draft, but not fit to be one
I still seek mental treatment on a quarterly basis, though with myself going freelance, I no longer have to worry that my treatment will be detrimental to employment and work
I have zero idea what the solution is.
[Edit]
After a little thought, honestly, automate the whole thing. Yes it removes an entire industry, but progress?
The problem is people think that any 'solution' to this problem needs to be perfect. "What if we never find out this guy was a problem" comes up. No. You just need to make the next system net _better_. Don't delay forward progress because the next step isn't "perfect".
It would solve the problem of "pilot needs someone to talk to about their issues with their wife", which is nice. But don't know if it solves the larger issue being discussed.
Put yourself in a pilot's shoes. Would you attend sessions if there was ANY chance of you not being able to fly? Would others? It's optional and your entire career hinges on not being grounded once. That's you, your family, and anyone else who depends on your income.
The perception of this solution is still the same as the current one - I can be grounded.
Initially it might work, but once that first guy gets grounded via the program (or maybe a few), word gets out that's what this system ends up doing - you're right back here wondering what the solution was that was so easy.
Mental health, "relatively easy" to fake esp if there's a lot of money waiting for you on the other-side if you get it right.
A lot of recent developments made things possible that were previously outrageous. Pilots will be reduced to mere backup, and eventually completely replaced by autonomous systems, just like the train engineers do nowadays, with the only pilots working remotely in command centers ready to take over if needed.
If we can do remote surgeries using robots, there’s no reason this couldn’t be a thing.
TBH that would cause way many problems than it potentially could solve, not even mentioning the technical difficulties to implement.
Though I agree with the rest, there should be a solution.
Such operations are gimmicks; the reality is that there has to be a surgeon present who is capable of doing the operation themselves.
I frequently get in arguments with my extended family because I believe pedophiles and criminals have rights. I talk about the documented history of innocent people being convicted of a crimes, but there are many guilty offenders. I want prison conditions to be better, and I use it as an example of "if you care about human rights, you care about them for everyone. Even convicted rapists and murderers." Sometimes I go off on another tangent because we should care about rights for immigrants as well. :) Then I lead into a 2nd bit where I say, "There are many pedophiles out there. People who have the tendencies, and people who have acted. We know that women who are pedophiles go under or un-reported." To treat some of this, we need mental health facilities available even for people we find disgusting and monstrous. We need a safe environment where they can go in anonymously and seek help. It may prevent someone who is just thinking about children from touching a child. Most people would rather just execute a SUSPECTED pedophile. That's how you get someone to hate themselves and the world and children and act on their impulses. Make the stigma and the reality for them worse. We love doing it in prisons. We love making prisoners suffer as a society.
So to draw the awful parallel: We need mental health facilities available for pilots with no ability to report-out on how many are effected. We need to ensure anonymity, and provide resources with no idea of how well they may be helping someone on the edge. Maybe loose/aggregate data points can be reported, but my strongest emphasis would be on providing anonymous support that is always and frequently available.
If you care about pilots and the passengers they ensure safety for, you need to extend the resources with no indication of how effective that is. You want them to receive care/treatment, for what very well could be a moments' ailment. If there is a long-term issue, it may help them with coping strategies. The alternative is letting it go untreated, and putting others at risk.
If the expectation is for people who are sick to further worsen their condition by becoming unemployed and discard themselves then the system is broken - simple as.
We need pilots with mental health issues to seek treatment for the safety of themselves and more importantly passengers. The mental health issue may be resistant to treatment or otherwise disqualify them from flying in the near or long term. When that happens, they lose their career.
A robust system for handling this eventuality, much like getting injured on the job, needs to be put in place.
I don’t have a better solution, but I also don’t really think it’s a big problem to begin with. The vast, vast majority of suicidal people still won’t take hundreds of others with them. They jump off buildings or shoot themselves or swallow a fistful of pills.
If I was a pilot, you bet your ass I’m going to hide any mental struggles I’m having from the FAA.
Now, I suppose if I had persistent and intrusive thoughts of darting my plane into a mountainside, I’d hopefully—during a moment of clarity—remove myself from any position that would enable me to carry that out.
But for “run-of-the-mill” depression? That’s my business. I can still perform the job.
How many pilots have intentionally crashed their planes for mental health reasons? The only one that comes to mind is that Germanwings pilot a few years ago. (EDIT: Apologies if the article answers this. I can’t see behind the paywall)
This one comes to mind for me, although not technically a pilot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Horizon_Air_Q400_incident
And, yeah, still can’t think of a good solution.
There's an additional problem here: if you have depression, you can bet your ass you're going to hide your mental struggles.
Thus we don't know if the pilots interviewed in the article are a) not coming forward with their mental struggles because of the policy, or b) are using the policy as an excuse not to come forward with their mental struggles.
(Coming from first-hand experience with a pilot who used the policy as an excuse not to get help with their mental struggles. E.g., after the person was no longer a pilot they still did not get help with their mental struggles.)
The simplest solution that comes to mind is paid recovery period with a guarantee to come back to the workforce after treatment.
Basically what is done in any other profession in countries with paid medical leaves.
> But for “run-of-the-mill” depression? That’s my business. I can still perform the job.
I'd beg to differ. Someone with a diagnosed depression ahouldn't be doing any job beyond stuff they do alone with no risk whatsoever (gender separating chicks ? tending sheeps ?), and I feel it's just problematic as a society to not have them get help. Nobody's truely unrelated and it has ripple effects.
MH370.
https://youtu.be/MhkTo9Rk6_4?si=dOiHmbQi2CGleyc_
The big thing that made me believe it is the captain had the same route on his simulator at home and deleted it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Eastern_Airlines_Fligh...
There is an easy one.
Simply remove mental illness as a thing you have to report.
I suspect that not getting help is far more likely to lead to an eventual bad outcome than any benefit you get from screening which causes everybody to hide everything.
Medical leave for prolonged treatment, however, is a bit trickier.
If you don’t have that information in the first place it’s ‘tragic’ and ‘unavoidable’.
Maybe it’s time we as a society start understanding risk, because while the information will certainly be ‘in-your-face’ in the event of such an incident, the rate of incidents in total would go down.
So what happens is that many of these type of drivers will simply not seek any help, because it is either that or their job / livelihood.
In fact, psychological test development studies use pilot screening to assess for the ability of a test to detect people who are trying to make themselves look good for exactly this reason.
It's a mess and counterproductive.
https://onemileatatime.com/news/delta-pilot-pulls-gun-captai...
That was last month.
> What on earth is wrong with people?
He drove a school bus to pass the time and for extra cash.
A lot of recent developments made things possible that were previously outrageous. In-cabin pilots will be reduced to mere backup, and eventually completely replaced by autonomous systems, just like the train engineers do nowadays, with the only pilots left working remotely in command centers ready to take over if needed.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but vast majority of aviation deaths nowadays is caused by human factor, including pilot mistakes.
If we can trust electronic voting or remote surgeries using robots, there’s no reason this couldn’t be a thing. Seems like the predictability of the heavily regulated and standardized aviation makes it a much better candidate for autonomous systems than automotive, and I’d argue that the public has already somewhat OK-ed the latter.
Given the baseline security of these sorts of systems, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
A defeatist take.
Since mental health became a thing, have we become more mentally healthy as a society? Has it actually accomplished anything of substance? Or is it just a bunch of theater?