In article ,
Larry Dighera wrote:

On Sat, 21 Jul 2007 04:31:14 -0700, Denny wrote
in . com:

There is no pilot medical record fraud other than the isolated
incident that will always pop up now and then...

This government document seems to contradict your subjective
assessment of the issue:

"seems" is an important word here.

caveat: I'm not defending anyone falsifying information on their
medical application. My primary motiviation in this response is
to try to point out the egregious misuse of statistics and lack of
useful information in the hearing document.




http://transportation.house.gov/Medi...7/SSM71707.pdf

In July 2005, a Department of Transportation Inspector General
("IG") investigation uncovered "egregious cases" of airmen lying
about debilitating medical conditions on their applications for
Airmen Medical Certificates. In a sample of 40,000 airmen
certificate-holders, the Inspector General found more than 3,200
airmen holding current medical certificates while simultaneously
receiving Social Security benefits,

Which is not proof of a problem since receiving social security
benefits is not necessarily inconsistent with holding a valid medical
certificate.

including those for medically
disabling conditions.

What would be much more useful would be the number of those
with medically disabling conditions. Unfortunately the IG apparently
didn't bother to count those, implying that all 3200 had disqualifying
conditions. I hope people can understand that this is not necessarily
true.

The hearing document references a research study (without attribution)
where approximately 9% of the toxicology reports from fatal accidents
indicate an airment with a serious unreported medical condition. One flaw
in the document is that it doesn't indicate whether or not the fatal accident
was a result of the unreported medical condition. A second flaw is that
it doesn't indicate if the serious unreported medical condition should have
disqualified the airman from having a valid medical. A third flaw is that
there is no discussion of whether or not the unreported medical condition
had existed prior to the airmen's last medical (e.g., was the condition new?).

In any case, the document indicates some 9% of the pilots in fatals accidents
had a unreported serious medical condition. Then the document makes the
claim that since ~1/3 of the pilots held first or second class medical
certificates that "the falsification issue is not limited to recreational general
aviation pilots." The reality is that there is insufficient information
presented to determine whether or not ANY of the pilots with first or second
class medicals falsified anything. In fact, there isn't sufficient information
presented to determine if any of the "recreational" pilots falsified anything.
Someone had the information, why didn't they indicate how many people
with first class medicals failed to report their serious medical condition?
How many with second class failed to report? How many with third
class? And how many of each these contributed the fatal accident?

If that pdf file is representative of the information that will be provided
at the hearings and used for future policy changes (if any), then I have
zero confidence that anything of any value will come of the hearings.

--
Bob Noel
(goodness, please trim replies!!!)