2. The FAA's pilot medical vetting process, while thorough, is behind the times. There are people who took ADHD medicine in high school that are unable to obtain a medical certificate due to the FAA's overly-strict policies on prescription drugs. There are current pilots with serious mental issues who are afraid to see a doctor about them due to fear of losing their medical license (https://www.flyingmag.com/why-pilots-dont-want-to-talk-about...).
> 1. The FAA basically handed their risk-management keys over to Boeing when authorizing the 737-MAX, contributing to those deaths
Couldn’t this also be interpreted as: when the FAA holds the keys, disasters like the 737-MAX tend not to happen? Obviously this raises questions about how that decision came about in the first place, but as an example, it seems counterproductive to your point, i.e. evidence that shifting away from some long standing policies directly led to harm, implying the original policies might have been better ones.
In a thread that seems eager to move fast and break things, this seems like a big problem, and would seem to indicate the need for a return to founding principles, not the opposite.
> 2. The FAA's pilot medical vetting process
This is an interesting one for sure, but also seems like an incredibly complex issue. Have there been studies about the safety of operating machinery while on those drugs that would obviate the need for a policy change?
The potential risk averted by such a policy would need to be weighed against the negative impacts of the 2nd order undesirable behaviors - obviously it’s bad that the policy discourages much needed mental health support, but how bad this is depends entirely on how effective the initial screening process is.
I’m not saying these mental health policies shouldn’t be changed, but neither do they seem to have obvious or measurably better alternatives at the moment.
And taken in the context of the original claim - that people are grossly misunderstanding the FAA and all of this is theater - they seem like weak examples to use as evidence of broad organizational failure.
Regarding #2, while there are a lot of issues with the FAA's medical process, you can absolutely get cleared to fly after having previously taken ADHD medication.
What you have to do is:
1. Not take those meds for at least 1-2 years.
2. Show documentation that getting off the meds hasn't impeded your performance. This generally means showing a stable work history if you've been off them for a long time or documents showing no change in performance between before you stopped taking them and x months after if you recently got off them.
3. Take an FAA ADHD re-evaluation.
Then they'll clear you. It's an annoying process but it's absolutely doable.
The FAA was gutted in the name of deregulation and competition - you might want to ask the GOP what happens when you don't have adequate govt oversight and regulation.
Two planes crashed due to a design flaw - hundreds of people killed and one manufacturer and model forever tarnished like McDonald Douglass and their DC-10.
>On August 5, following the PATCO workers' refusal to return to work, the Reagan administration fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life. In the wake of the strike and mass firings, the FAA was faced with the difficult task of hiring and training enough controllers to replace those that had been fired. Under normal conditions, it took three years to train new controllers. Until replacements could be trained, the vacant positions were temporarily filled with a mix of non-participating controllers, supervisors, staff personnel, some non-rated personnel, military controllers, and controllers transferred temporarily from other facilities. PATCO was decertified by the Federal Labor Relations Authority on October 22, 1981. The decision was appealed but to no avail, and attempts to use the courts to reverse the firings proved fruitless.
My late friend Ron Reisman worked at NASA Ames Research Center on air traffic control and flight safety, and he hired up a bunch of the professional air traffic controllers who Reagan fired, and taught them to program.
Because it's much easier to teach an air traffic controller how to program, than it is to teach a programmer how to control air traffic.
And we have them to thank for how safe the air traffic control system is today.
>Ron Reisman has BA in Philosophy and Classical Greek, and an MS in Computer Science. He joined NASA Ames Research Center in 1988 as one of the original members of the Center Tracon Automation System development team. Since the late 1990s he has worked on traffic flow management research and development. He is currently supporting the Next Generation Air Traffic System research.
I saw him give an earlier version of this talk at the November 1989 Usenix Montery Graphics Conference, where he discussed training air traffic controllers to program, and he subsequently gave me a tour of the flight simulators and air traffic control systems at NASA Ames:
>Ron Reisman and James Murphy, NASA Ames
Research Center, and Rob Savoye, Seneca Software
>This introduction to air traffic control systems summarizes the operational characteristics of the principal Air Traffic Management (ATM) domains (i.e., en route, terminal area, surface control, and strategic traffic flow management) and the challenges of designing ATM
decision support tools. The Traffic Flow Automation
System (TFAS), a version of the Center TRACON
Automation System (CTAS), will be examined. TFAS
achieves portability across platforms (Solaris, HP/UX,
and Linux) by adherence to software standards (ANSI,
ISO, POSIX). Software engineering issues related to
design, code reuse, portability, performance, and
implementation are discussed.
Based on what I know about Ron's and other people's diligent methodological work on air traffic control and safety, I feel extremely safe and confident flying, and I find it insulting to his memory and the legacy of his work when the armchair architect ex-Facebook employees on this thread (and the GOP) glibly and patronizingly implore the FAA to "move fast and break things", as if they had no idea how many lives and fortunes are at stake.
Here's a video of Ron showing Marvin Minsky the flight simulator, an early AR headset, and the hydraulic lifts:
“It’s gotten to the point that I never say anything about intelligence in general. I don’t know what it means any more. I used to. But then I started trying to test it. And if you think about it for a while, you don’t know what it is.” -Ron Reisman
737Max saga has nothing to do with air traffic control.
"The FAA, citing lack of funding and resources, has over the years delegated increasing authority to Boeing to take on more of the work of certifying the safety of its own airplanes."
"There wasn’t a complete and proper review of the documents,” the former engineer added. “Review was rushed to reach certain certification dates.”
Seems like FAA certification was a disaster in the making.
1. The FAA basically handed their risk-management keys over to Boeing when authorizing the 737-MAX, contributing to those deaths (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-boeing-and...)
2. The FAA's pilot medical vetting process, while thorough, is behind the times. There are people who took ADHD medicine in high school that are unable to obtain a medical certificate due to the FAA's overly-strict policies on prescription drugs. There are current pilots with serious mental issues who are afraid to see a doctor about them due to fear of losing their medical license (https://www.flyingmag.com/why-pilots-dont-want-to-talk-about...).