All the chat about medicals is the sort of smoke and mirrors swerve tactic employed by the MoD/RAF/HQAC hoping people get absorbed in technicalities, so they can carry on and avoid actually dealing the real problem in meaningful manner.
As so often with air accidents, the medical status of the pilot was one of the factors; a major one, but others were important too. If you look at the recommendations in the AAIB report (on their website), there were also changes to the training and supervision processes; the ‘chairoplane’ being one obvious example.
On the subject of medicals and the “stats” which we can collect.
Is there evidence to indicate a Class1 is a “safer” option. Ie, of the BGA/local flying club instructors who only require class 2 incidents, how many of these were caused/as result of the medical status of the pilot?
I recognise that a Class1 pilot is a “healthier” pilot, but is it a bar that need not be reached?
We don’t apply a medical expectation on drivers of vehicles (yes I accept D1 requires it on application, but is a one off and never reviewed again) yet for flying pilots must not only be checked (and industry standard) but to the highest level available.
Is this really in line with ALARP? – specifically reasonably practical?
Take security checking for instance.
We are all (or will be) BPSS checked.
Many will be SC/CTC checked to touch weapons/be involved in shooting.
But why not go so far as DV checking??
If the evidence supports class 2 medical pilots are the cause of incidents and therefore are significantly more “dangerous” to fly with, then sure lets apply Class1.
But the more I think about it I cannot see how it is “reasonably practical” to apply the highest level of medical to an otherwise eligible pilot (appropriate licence and experience/hours) should the evidence suggest that a significant portion of incidents are a result of a class 2 pilot’s health which would have been picked up had they completed a class 1 check…
The question of instructing on a class2 has been raised to the CFMO she says if I remember the number correctly class 2 would be a 15% increase in incapacitation risk and they’ll stick with the RAF medical.
I have no idea how they worked out the numbers and from what data but that’s the reason given.
I wonder how she has derived that very specific number? Presumably she has looked at incapacitation statistics for holders of RAF medical vs Class 2. There can’t be enough RAF gliding instructors for that data, so she may have had to use the stats for all Class 2 holders.
I wonder if she has corrected for the age profile of the holders of those medicals? After all, quite a lot of GA pilots are quite old.
Also, is that a rate increase? (i.e. is it, say, a rise from a 1/100 risk to a 16/100 risk - which sound a lot - or a rise from a 0.01% risk to a 0.0115% risk, which is neglible)?
Parents of Cadet whoever turn up and ask a few more than the standard questions about their upcoming offspring’s flying or gliding slot, specifically, who the Pilot will be, what qualifications they have, what medical they have, what is the aircraft etc etc.
Granted we cannot answer all those questions for either AEF, VGS or Civvy flying, but at least with the Civvy flying, we can easily provide a lot of the general information from the CAA or Flying school/ club website if they choose to read it and do the homework, for example medical standards, qualifications etc. We do not have access to that (easily / at all?) for military Flying, and we would be entirely dependent on saying, ‘it’s the RAF and Military don’t worry’.
I’m not trying to knock our service Flying and Gliding assurance set up here, but we can more easily provide assurance information for Civvy flying, even though its prohibited.
Just thought I’d throw that out there as a different way of looking at it, and happy to be corrected if any of the above is incorrect, but I think the above would be representative of what would happen on most Squadrons if questions of this nature were asked.
There is actually a lot of 2FTS related forms/publications on Sharepoint. But it isn’t in Key Docs. If you go to the home page and click 2FTS at the top (where the list of regions is) it brings you to their page. Within that area they have their own document library that has a lot of stuff in it.
both links are showing published 2016 but that was 5 years ago and could well have been updated since (although to answer the questions being posed would it be sufficient? - i suspect so)
I realise you don’t know, but another question is whether that was compared against class 2 having pilots, or class 2 having instructors.
Was it correctly equated and normalised between our x thousand flights and their 10000x thousand flights?
Time in the air, distance from the airfield, date of last medical, did their cat have kittens the night before, were any of those in the civvie stats out on a drunken jolly, were they testing their G Meter…
I originally went into a lot of maths here, but there’s too many unknowns to keep it sane. Bottom line is our occurrence is pretty darn low or we’d be shut down already and a 15% increase likely only takes days off the incident rate, not adds incidents per year.