Jaba-who

Just to play devils advocate There is a downside about building your own aircraft, getting it flying and then then learning to fly in it. First you gotta build it. The average time in Australia to build an aircraft ( GA experimental at least - as shown in a small report I read somewhere back when I built my Jab ) is 7 years. The same report as best I recall said that something like just under a half never get completed. So there's a major consideration. It's a long time and lots can change in your life in that time. Lots can happen which may cause your flying dream never to happen. Have you really considered whether buying an aircraft that's working here and now is an option. I've been through this soul searching myself and I had aircraft to hire etc while I was doing my build so it was not really an issue. But if you don't have an aircraft then the old saying of " the less you fly the less you want to fly" comes in. You may find that in ten years you have a half completed kit in your shed and no desire or capacity to complete it and then start the journey of getting your licence. The cost of buying a kit plus build tools, workshop mods, paint and prep etc might be the same as buy a plane already done and do your licence in it. Just a thought.

That's not what CASA go on. It's not who does it it's what they do. All those kits have a set of parameters that were in the build and flight schedule when they get approved as kits. If you build it with everything matching the schedule then its likely to get a 25 hour phase 1 test schedule. If the build does not match the manufacturers approved schedule then it becomes an un"certified " ( for want of a better term) kit. Regardless of who put it together CASA will want it to go through longer test phase to prove the mods are safe. An engine builder may be great about building an engine but have limited knowledge about the effects the engine will have on a specific airframe - resonance issues, weights and balance issues, probably plenty of other interaction issues.

Now that we have diverged off onto all sorts of tangents I am still unsure of the details of the original question. Adrian222 seems to have gone to ground and without more detail this question remains a complex whorl of uncertainty. I still would like to know: Is this aircraft already built or is it proposed to be built? If it's already built has it been given a certificate of airworthiness or is that still to come? Is it RAAus or GA experimental?

Not sure if the same thing applies to RAAus certificate of airworthiness but in GA experimental aircraft the Authorised person can say you must do either 25 hours or more (typically 40 hours. ) If the aircraft is a proven design, kit etc built exactly to specs according to the kit manufacturer etc then typically you will only need 25 hours. If on the other hand anything at all is not standard, or the aircraft is made from plans and self sourced materials or contains mods etc then you get the 40 hour phase 1 trial requirement. An engine not approved or explicitly tested by the kit manufacturer would count as a major deviation from standard. did the RAAus advice source know it was a Rotec not a Rotax?

When it comes down to the letter of the law the Truckie is in the wrong. And in terms of trying to analyse this particular event I have to say I tend to agree with SQDI. But in general terms I think the time has arrived to revise these laws. They were written at a time when dash cams didn't exist. All arguments about who caused it were heresay and opinion and could have been impossible to adjudicate on most of the time. Making a blanket hard nosed rule kept an endless line of litigants with insoluble cases out of the courts. But now we have dash cams -so maybe it is time to generate a set of rules to cover various scenarios.

I must admit I’m going on Qld law and what it was in 1990s. Before the advent of dash cams. In those days it was all my word against yours type stuff. I had about 4 or 5 cars in front of me. I got stung for the lot. insurance covered it eventually but as my luck would have it, it was a loaner car from a dealer and they tried to get out of it. I knew nothing of it all for about a year till I got a surprise summons delivered to me at home one night. The law at the time was - I was the guilty party. Obviously got the lawyer etc. but nope. Then it was if you rear ended someone you were in the wrong - period. Only mitigating circumstances were if the vehicle in front was driving backwards at the time. You had to prove the vehicle reverse gear was engaged. Of course it wasn’t in this case because it was a sudden stop in traffic and no debate about that. As I stated, in the chain impact scenario the last car is the guilty one because there would always be the claim by one of the middle guys that he DID stop in time but was rear ended and pushed into the car in front by the impact. Thus the guy behinds fault. In the end my legal challenge was not who was at fault in the crash - that was foregone. My challenge was proving I was covered by the dealers insurance. That took ages but was eventually proved so I had minimal costs. ( in $s. But not in emotional stress etc)

Some years ago I had the unfortunate experience of being the driver who ran into someone who stopped suddenly. Tried to get out of it because all the same reasons you've quoted. But OME in Queensland at least he's absolutely correct. There is almost no situation where the runner-up- the-bum is in the right. The only way you get out of anything is if someone else runs into you as well. Then it's the unlucky guy in the last car in the line who carries the whole cost/blame. ( yep -that was me too hence the desire to get out of it - four or five cars with me the lucky last. ) in Qld - driving too close to the car in front and being unable stop if the front driver suddenly stops is the dangerous at fault bit. If you are driving it is your legal right to stop, slam on the brakes when you want. The reason there are laws about the distance from the car in front separation is to allow for sudden stops - there are a heap of legal reasons why you might have to slam on the brakes - child, animal, pedestrian jumps onto roadway, bits fall off car in front of you etc etc. all totally legitimate reasons that may not be observable to the driver behind. So no observable reason why the driver stops is not a traffic offence. Driving too close to stop is.

At big airports like cairns I have been approached by the federal police and airport security guys who beetle around in 4WDs. At Townsville and Mackay guys of uncertain role in clearly marked cars belonging to the airport. In Darwin - a camera. “Hold up your card to the camera and move it in out and round about till the numbers came into focus.” At emerald the refueler guy. Have been asked over the phone for the card number somewhere -forget where. Might have been Uluru. Alice springs - had to say I had one. Showed it to the guy ( airport security guy) but he was not interested. As far as he was concerned my red one wasn’t worth his low level grey one. Insisted we could not go anywhere unescorted by him.

Or perhaps not. Unlike most of society, aviation law in Australia is covered by a part of the act as being governed by Strict Liability. Essentially that means if you do something wrong you are guilty and reasons, mitigations or intentions not to break the law, but accidentally doing so, are irrelevant. You are guilty. All crimes in aviation law are allotted penalty units. I haven’t kept up with the amount but $150 per unit seems to stick in my head. Could be wrong on that) CASA is able to charge you, penalise (and take your licence) first. CASA is lawmaker,judge jury and executioner and also the first line appeal judge. Only after a failed appeal can you go to the administrative tribunal. If you want to fight it it has to be done as an appeal on the appeal not as the initial legal fight. So the issue is that you might not have a problem BUT if you are bailed up for not having one you may well end up in the blink of an eye licence-less and/or owing significant amounts of money and having no or very limited legal grounds to try to get any of them back. Experience in history over the last two decades I have been flying has been that CASA seems to have cyclic episodes of crashing down on pilots. Quiet for a while then nab a few guys and make examples followed by quiet again for a while. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable betting on now to remain a quiescent time for them.

All true nev. but your last line is the stumbling block. We live in the age of “I want a quick fix or no fix!” I would see at least one patient every day of my working life who has a disorder who is not managing it and the lifestyle which has caused it properly. Almost all are aware and started on the appropriate changes to manage it but have abandoned it somewhere along the way. WRT angiograms vs stress tests ( of which there multiple different types). The problem with choosing a blanket test for everyone is that they actually show you different things and neither tells you everything. And stress echos actually carry the highest risk you can’t do the test itself. Fat people sitting or standing while exercising are hard to get good images on ultrasound. So you often end up just saying the test was inconclusive. If you really wanted cover all bases you’d make everyone have both. But even then you’d still run into issues. Both have false positives and negatives and sadly the false + or - can create more problems sometimes. It’s all compromises but the biggest issue is that no matter what the findings on the test (even positive findings ) there is no proven correlation with pilots having medical incapacitation in flight. They might as well ask your eye color and ground all blue eyed pilots for all the good it will do.

Yep. You are completely correct. I should apologize to statisticians. Statisticians give us the numbers. It’s the media, the government and CASA which take the numbers and turn it into a numeric abomination for their own agendas. There’s been heaps of examples over the years. But essentially I’m sure the statisticians would tell casa the figures should not be used because they are too small to be statistically or practically usable. But I doubt CASA bothers with that. That have a history of misusing statistics.

Quote: “Here's a hypothetical: A patient comes to you and requests an angiogram. They do manual laboring, and the company doctor has created a policy that workers over 50 must have an angiogram because they don't want people to have a heart attack on the job. There are no indications they need it, but if they don't get the test they will lose their job. Do you do the test?” In today’s world of litigation and informed consent it’s a no brainer and easily answered. We tell the patient of the risks and benefits, advise the patient what is clinically appropriate. Then the patient chooses to go ahead or not. Informed consent by law now requires advice of the consequences of not going ahead with treatment. ( in this case - not fulfilling the employers demand but that’s already known to the patient. But they make the decision not the doctor. We tell the patient all the risks and benefits. The patient is then by law required to consider the options and sign a consent form outlining they have considered and understand the risks and they wish to go ahead. Some of our consent forms are simple , some go for several pages. The longest I have seen in our institution is 4 A4 pages long. A consent form is not a waiver to prevent suing. It is an acknowledgement they have been advised of the risks and benefits and they accept those risks. In the case of a work related test - it would be an intrinsic benefit that they get the job. And also intrinsic risk of the test is having a complication of the test ( or indeed failing the test and losing the job ) Now I don’t for a minute suggest every patient does much more than say “yeah doc, I’m fine on that give me the form. “ But the option is there to ask lots of questions and back out before going ahead.

This has become a cyclic argument. You have said multiple times we should be doing something. Multiple replies have said: We are. We have. Our representative groups have. A major industry review and report has. In response the party with the sole authority and rule to change it has said “No” and if you as pilots do anything we have said is unlawful you will suffer. If you have any other ideas to effect change where all others have failed please do it. Time to stop this particular back and forth on this thread I think.

Skippy, while it might look like people are doing nothing, you are not entirely correct about the do nothing - AOPA is doing stuff, SAAA is doing stuff, the membership does stuff to drive the admin of these organisations to do their stuff. there is a lot of social media groups about it, there's a Facebook page called something like "pilots against asic " there have been at least one widely publicised project which asked for submissions to CASA about them ( which I submitted to) which had a few hundred submissions as I recall. It was also part of that report about how CASA is stuffing up aviation ( I think that was the Forster report" ) There's heaps being done about it. But the trouble is there is no inclination from the government to change it because it forms part of the governments publicity about the war on terror ( even though it has nothing to do with it) and it it is yet another mechanism of CASA to control pilots. When it comes to what else we could do - well sadly flying without an ASIC is not an option for some and not worth the risk to others. The risk is that if you do get some local little Hilter decides to make an example of you then you make end up with a conviction that not only would stop your flying days it may lose you your job and everything else you hold dear. So on balance for many of us as difficult or annoying as it is - it's easier to get one. In fact not having one may realistically not even be an option.

First point - that's exactly what I was saying but I was implying a step further. Sorry you didn't get what I meant. How many pilots are there in Australia? About 40000 I think, many of whom are not active. How many of the active ones would have clinical justification for needing say a stress test? Probably a few maybe. How many are forced to have one? Maybe a few hundred. We already know that several hundred thousand stress tests are done per year in Australia alone and there are less than probably a hundred events needing resuscitation. Almost all ( Mabye all) of these are on patients who have some clinical reason to suspect heart disease. Therefore the risk of adverse event in a population with higher risk is negligibly small. So it is reasonable to suspect that the risk in a population done purely as screening who have no cardiac risk must be even smaller. But what we don't have in Australia is enough pilots or enough time to do enough tests to actually gain any usable information. But what we do know is the raw numbers from the limited data we have is that the risk is probably near zero. The practical lack of subjects makes the thought process hypothetical and its attempted use in clinical ( or administrative/ real world scenarios) futile.

Oh how I wish that were true. The health department's have HUGE lists of requirements for medical facilities depending on what they aim to do there. There they send inspectors ( "the dragon ladies" we called em ). They would come and check you had everything required in just the right places etc or you got no accreditation and then you got not provider number so you could not bill for it. You cannot undertake medical practice of certain procedures in an unaccr cited facility. Acccreditation happens at regular intervals varies according to the stuff you are going to do there. Accreditation costs tens of thousands of dollars and they can close your practice down for ridiculous stuff. When we set up a small day unit for minor stuff we had all the required stuff you mentioned but some of the stuff that got knocked back was unbelievable: Mop in the closet was on a hook too high above the bucket - fail cos drops could splash out and contaminate floor Yellow curtains too bright - distract patients from reading safety signs. Had to change tap handles to $800 long arm ones you can turn on and off with elbows because sink had a soap dispenser next to it - that made it a "scrub sink" despite no surgical scrub happening in that room. Ok we'll take away the soap dispenser - Ha Ha no you won't because you have submitted the room inventory and it has a soap dispenser. Can't go backwards only forward. And even if you could get away with out accreditation requirements for sure Murphy's luck would be that your first patient would be the rare one and you could not defend the bad outcome. Negligent!! and the health department would be on your like the proverbial ton of bricks.

On the contrary. There has been much debate and much push from AOPA, SAAA, the multitude of forums and chat groups. I have a vague idea ( but could be wrong) The Forster report had a section on ASICs and the feelings of the industry about them. All to no avail. CASA and the government have used intransigence over the ASIC as their evidence of going tough on terrorism and aviation security. They have made statements that they will not allow our airport security to be cut back etc etc making it sound as though ASICs are contributing to safer skies. Easier votes from an electorate who doesn't know what an ASIC card is and who it is who has to have one etc. and at what cost and certainly who doesn't know how little they contribute to anything. As far as joe blogs is concerned we all fly in and out of big airports and we all could be terrorists going to load up our Cessnas ( that's the only aircraft they know the name of) with bombs ( lots of them) and fly these fully loaded missiles into skyscrapers. Stuff the government doesn't correct.

Health departments and the specialist colleges have rules about what equipment has to be in place to do the tests. So we have them in place regardless. Of course the great majority of people coming for tests have some symptoms or actual suspicion there is a disease process going on so they would justify having the resusc equipment. So when the occasional healthy pilot comes in you have the gear there already so you don't have to make any decisions about going ahead without it. As far as the proportion of events stress testing would cause compared to events in flight - they are both so rare that you would probably have to test for decades before you could generate enough numbers to show any actual positive events comparison that was valid. This is the problem of using statistical significance without considering the clinical significance. A problem that CASA often seems to not understand. For example - if you have a rare event and it happens say once in a year across all of Australia. In a particular year it happens twice. Statistically the event has doubled in incidence and would cause red flags to rise in statisticians everywhere because a 100% increase is statistically significant. But in clinical reality an event that happens once in a million tests is as good as exactly the same as an event that happens 2 times in a million tests. No sensible person would say that the rise from 1 to 2 would justify doing expensive tests with intrinsic risks and an incidence of false positives or false negatives ( as all tests have) on everyone to try to prevent that one extra case. So yes as you ask, is it ethical to do tests that have a high risk of causing a problem in a population with a low risk of having the disease they are searching for?. And the answer is basically no it would not be ethical. The saving grace is that in the pilot population having a stress test ( where no symptoms are present) is pretty much a no or very low risk. Almost certainly less than the already negligible risk of having a cardiac event in the air. But both are so small the mention of rather cause 20 events in the stress lab rather than 1 in the air is a non-sensical statement.

No you don't need a passport. In fact if you are an Australian citizen you can't use it as your main ID at all, only as the second line additional bit. You need the birth certificate. I rolled up with passport and drivers licence and some other stuff ( maybe Medicare card and some other things) "nope -go away and come back with your birth certificate. " But If you are a foreign national you need your passport and visa. Go figure!

Too many people putting in their two cents worth about what they interpret from something that has not actually gone beyond a thought bubble. It seems to me the statements of aerobatics originated not from CASA but in an article by Flying Magazine. The CASA media release (which as far as I can tell has been the only word from CASA about this whole thing) doesn't say anything about it. But the Flying article says two things completely unsupported by the CASA media release - firstly that aerobatics will be excluded from the basic Class 2 and secondly that non-passenger carrying commercial ops will be covered by the basic Class 2 which is not what CASA media release says at all. ( they say the standard Class 2 will be all that's required for these) So I think the confusion has arisen from poor reporting in t he Flying Magazine article. There is so much confusion about this. This is mainly I think because everyone is forgetting the absolute fact -which is: firstly this basic class 2 does not actually exist and no actual wording or even draft legislation has even been written or at least published. The announcement was from CASA to say " we now have a policy to think about introducing a new version of a medical which we haven't actually written and don't have any idea what it's actually going to be. It will based on a standard which we will then modify to suit our perceptions but which have yet to be thought out. " While it's fun to speculate there are people who are getting really wound up about it and talking like it exists and it's cast in stone and that it's going to be their saviour or their downfall.

Well .... yes but that’s a flippant response that carries little or no evidential backing. We’d all also like our pilots to have their food poisoning at home and their laser strike while fixing the Christmas lights on the tree not in the cockpit. Doesn’t mean making them eat off prawns or doing the lights at home will stop it happening at work or change any risk of it happening at work. The people who have events on the treadmill are always people with symptoms and plenty of evidence that have problems. I have done heaps of stress ecgs ( as the doctor not the treadmiller) and the only time we had to resuscitate anyone or the few with significant events were people in whom we had a high index of suspicion before the event. I have never seen or heard of someone, locally ( although yes there are very isolated reports in the literature) with basically minimal or only age or single indications for the test being done having an major event.

Yep. The cost thing may turn out to be yet another Trojan horse. Just because it hasn’t been said in black and white they (CASA) won’t charge doesn’t mean they won’t. The other thing is that a GP will charge for a licensing examination - which is not rebateable under Medicare ( and a dr can be fined, made to repay and struck off if they do charge it to Medicare and it is a continuing and frequent offence). There is no “extra” charge for a DAME doing the licence exam than a GP doing essentially the same exam. So there is no reason the cost of going to a GP will be any less than when going to a DAME. And if your medical condition indicates tests being done they will be the same tests as your DAME would have ordered at the same cost. My own feeling is that until all doctors (any doctor) are pulled out of the loop for anything other than the initial and only exam as they are for the American system then there really isn’t a cost saving. It will be a change so CASA can say they’ve changed things, without really changing much at all. We have to accept that this will be RAMPC mark 2 until proven otherwise.

I haven’t read the aforementioned pages. But in medical terminologies if it says “clinically indicated” without actually defining the indications then it is leaving the decision about what is an indication to the doctor. In the real world, in some organ system diseases ( and cardiac system is one) age can be as legitimate an indication as any other. Especially when/if other factors are present. The more others are present the more you might correctly say that age is an indication. Indicators are not absolutes they vary from being minor to significant. Even if no other factors are there age may still be a low level indication. So when a dame believes age is an indication he is right - it is. Whether it is significant enough to justify the test is the question. Of course if the result comes out finding a problem then iPod facto it was justified. While you are correct Mike that stress tests have a risk of inducing a cardiac event the risk is actually very low. And the CASA response would be that if you did have a cardiac event doing a stress test then it proves the point you had unstable disease so shouldn’t be flying till the cause is sorted out. And despite my vehement opposition to most things CASA and medicals I probably would agree with them ( mostly) in that. However I don’t think they should be relying or demanding of so many to have them. It’s pretty obvious when you sit in front of a patient from their history when they are likely to fly through a stress test test without problem. I have a mate who has to have a stress test every 2 years and always passes it. But any idiot will know he will pass it because he does heavy manual labour digging trenches with a shovel in hand every day of the week. He does his own personal stress test every day at work. CASA costs him thousands in unidicated tests as well.

You know that and I know that ( and I bet CASA know that ) but c'mon we all know that's not the CASA way! But seriously, it seems that no matter what is proven in the rest of the world we have a system here that nurtures the demi-gods to believe that somehow we are different and we require a different set of rules. But even more radically than the rest of the world - Short of a few real medical issues like frequent epileptic fits or very unstable type 1 diabetes or some ( only some) unstable cardiac issues the real world experience is that - if CASA were to be honest and open minded and if we actually started with a clean slate - the statistics actually show that we propbably actually don't need ANY medical for ANY form of licence. Sounds radical but -The gut-feeling that society has that flying an aircraft is so stressful or demanding that people with underlying diseases will suddenly have medical incapacitations is actually not supported by any evidence. Sure there have been studies that show your heart rate goes up and BP goes up etc. but there is no evidence that these are actually detrimental to the kind of person who feels fit enough and interested enough to go flying. RAAus and ultralight licences around the world are full of people with medical issues that preclude them passing formal aviation medicals that's frequently they got into that form of flying and there is no evidence from any country who does so that these pilots have any increased incidence of medical incapacitations over pilots with medicals. I have managed the medical conditions of a number of commercial pilot over the years who I am sure have been, shall-we-say, "careful" with what they have told their DAME and they continued to fly for decades without an incident. The sky has been full of people with underlying severe disease that they didn't know about but which medically speaking must have been present for years ( because that's the known history of these diseases). They have passed their class 1 and 2 medicals and flown safely without incident until the disease was picked up -often incidentally by a non-aviation medical or when symptoms started to appear. They were diagnosed, treated and got better in the non-aviation world of medicals and as far as the aviation medicals were concerned the world turned blissfully onward as if they were perfectly well the whole told time. If CASA were to adopt an honest evidence based approach I suspect we would have no medicals at all for any level except for a self declaring medical with the guidance of being safe to drive a car ( at a private car licence level). But of course that's all too much to expect.

The whole issue is very complex so that why you need to really ask a lot of questions and explore all options. But sometimes you are between a rock and a hard place with not many of them. The issue of as its called " post operative cognitive dysfunction" is one of those areas where we are making good advances with understanding it but not always being able to do anything about it. The problem is not just the anaesthetic but also that most patients are put onto a heart lung bypass machine which is the probable cause of much of it but also the surgery itself and the early post-operative phase where things can go awry and cause poor brain blood flow with same result. Basically a few things can all contribute and in any specific case you never know which was the major and which were just also-rans.