Third Class Medical: Surely There’s Some Grim Humor Here

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How can one not see the grim humor in last week’s confluence of events that seemed tailor made to tank Third Class medical reform? Hapless doesn’t even begin to describe general aviation’s fate before the fortunes of a callous world.The first turn of bad timing was obviously the untimely death of an American Airlines captain flying a redeye from Phoenix to Boston. The second is the pathetic meltdown in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday.

I spoke with a senior AME I’ve known for many years. And sure enough, there are pilots flying around with First Class certs who have had all manner of cardiac issues, including bypasses. These pilots can be—and should be—issued medicals to return to work. The FAA has carte blanche in keeping such pilots on the shortest possible string with regard to monitored care and ongoing observation in order to maintain the First Class medical under special issuance. My AME source said this monitoring protocol would probably be vastly more stringent than even the most particular cardiologist might recommend, but that’s the FAA for you.

There are two ways this might be interpreted by the political class that could impact discussions about the Third Class at the worst possible moment. One is that medical monitoring is somehow insufficient and if we just had more of it, that American skipper would have never reported for work. Daily EKG anyone? Monthly medical exam? Never mind that there’s no statistical support for this at any level, for any level of medical in any kind of flight operation. Don’t forget that the origin of medicals was bureaucratic, not safety. The government wanted to thin of the herd of pilot applicants after World War II and phony medical requirements was as good a way as any. It worked. It’s still working.

Let’s just recognize that Congress and even FAA managers deal in perceptions as much as in any kind of statistically based reasoning. Want an example of how politics intersects aviation? There you are. Go ahead and froth up with the usual complaints, but this is the political reality of the government/citizen interface.

The other side of this dull blade is that people who argue medicals are a useless waste of time and money have definitively been shown to be right. They had already been shown be right for the last 50 years and the advent of the driver’s license medical for light sport just proves the point yet again.

We could blindly hope that a bolt of logic would strike the bureaucratic edifice and, as my AME friend argues, we would just do away entirely with medical certification for all classes and all operations. We have a rich statistical history to support this and for a conservative Congress bent on saving money, eliminating the medical would help. It’s postage stamp money, but at least the trend line goes in the right direction. It would also reduce regulation, another oft-discussed ideological bullet point.

This won’t happen for reasons you should readily understand. We are deep into the political realm here and that’s a place where not only does logic not rule, it’s an alien concept. The only way to effectively address this is the way it is being addressed by broad legislation that forces FAA reform. That’s what Sen. Jim Inhofe has been trying to do with his Pilot’s Bill of Rights 2. Yet just to show how perverse all of this can be, some of us don’t like Inhofe because of the little runway dustup down in Texas a few years ago. I’ve received emails saying as much. That’s cool. Just keep not liking him and keep on sweating your medical every year. Or swallow your pride and take help from whence it comes.

And that gets us to the House meltdown. As we’ve reported, Inhofe’s bill is close, ever so close, to at least remaining viable, never mind passing. But because of objections all of us in aviation find preposterous, Inhofe had to entertain amendments and revisions and to broaden the sponsorship of his bill. It’s already unusually well sponsored, which is good. The fact is, bills, even good ones, get waylaid all the time for procedural reasons, for political reasons and for no reason. The founders actually intended it that way so we wouldn’t be buried in laws.

My worry is that now that the lower chamber is in utter disarray, Inhofe’s bill could lose momentum and get sidetracked, amended further or just never come to a vote because the House can’t so much as elect a Speaker, never mind finding an effective one. So that means we have a paralyzed FAA overseen by a paralyzed Congress. It’s not new paralysis of course, it’s just worse. Federal agencies have always worked this way.

There’s a third issue here that’s not much above the surface: the Germanwings accident, in which a psychotically depressed pilot committed suicide and took an entire planeload of passengers with him. Evidently, the FAA is spooked about this and quite likely to use it as leverage to maintain or even increase medical surveillance. FAA managers live in fear of explaining things to Congress, even as they ignore congressional directives. The FAA manager who could courageously explain that the government can’t protect us against everything doesn’t exist. But then you knew that.

Meanwhile, I’m hoping S571 is of such blinding moral purity that a beneficent deity will see that it sails through Congress as if none of this other stuff happened. For the next couple of weeks, I’m thinking I’ll just ignore reality. Having written my Congressman, I don’t have a better plan than that.

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