Larry Dighera wrote:
How is it that airmen are able to hide their medical conditions from
the licensed medical doctor examining them, but not from Congress?

Obviously they can't. The airmen were either:

1) Committing fraud against the Social Security Administration,
2) Committing fraud against the Federal Aviation Administration,
3) Neither of the above.

There are too many problems with the committee's report[1] that it is
difficult to know where to start. Here's an attempt:

A) Claiming that after examining the records of 40,000 airmen (over 6%
of all airmen), the 45 that they _charged_ with fraud (about 0.1%)
constitutes a "widespread" problem. Looks like 99.9% compliance to me.

B) Confusing "charged" with "convicted".

C) Assumes case (2) above rather than (1) but fails to give the reasons
to prefer one over the other.

D) Assumes incorrectly that post-mortem results are reliable indicators
of fraud rather than, say, simple oversights or honest mistakes.

E) Assumes incorrectly that the post-mortem drug results numbers can be
extrapolated. Such an extrapolation is valid only if those who are
medically unfit are just as likely to crash as healthy pilots. But of
course if that were the case then there would be no safety value in
denying unhealthy pilots from flying! So if the rate of accidents of
unfit pilots is presumed to be an unknown amount greater than that of
fit pilots (e.g. 1000 times higher) then, for example, if 10% of fatal
accidents appear to involve unfit pilots then only 0.01% of all pilots
are unfit - not 10% of all pilots!

F) After introducing the ~0.1% number that were charged with fraud, then
discards it and uses the incorrectly extrapolated ~10% number to claim
"wide spread" fraud. Under what definition, outside of the rhetorical
and political realm, is 99.9% or even 90% compliance considered evidence
of widespread non-compliance?

G) One of the "unclear on the concept" recommendations is to require
pilots to state whether or not they are receiving medical disability
benefits. If the applicant was willing to lie about other aspects then
why does anyone think the applicant would suddenly find honesty with
that requirement?

[1] http://transportation.house.gov/Medi...e%20Report.pdf