Tricky problem. I sympathize with pilots here, but the zero-risk approach has worked very well for fliers in aggregate.
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.
That's worse than it being out in the open.