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’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).
I've wondered if flying private would be any different. I don't "NEED" to work for AA.