Halliday Tox report

Well 0.01 is a non issue. The morophine, according to another article, was for pain killers for stones (not that it makes it okay to fly), but it’s not like he was an addict.
 
Seems like they were all drugs that cause poor decisions to be made, hence the aviation prohibition.
 
Don't forget, our laboratory technology has risen to the level that we have the ability to detect miniscule amounts of drugs now.
So finding a drug does not necessarily equate to recent consumption nor especially, impairment.
They can probably find that last molecule of ethanol attached to only one of your billion liver cells, 2 months after your last drink.

Some are saying it is time these tox reports be accompanied by guidelines, so that the average reader is not misled by them.
Ie: "The samples contained 1 part per quadrillion of benadryl. The levels in the average person's tissues, one week after consuming the label dose of benadryl is 500ppm"
 
Lol, you guys know what?

Spoiler alert
It wasn't drugs that got him killed.
 
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Pretty easy to spot the Halladay fans in this thread. Excuses, excuses. Remember when you lie on your medical and take drugs and go flying that if you crash and kill yourself, you're going to look pretty stupid. I was so sad about this accident. Now I'm even more sad - for his family. They have to live with this. At least he didn't kill anyone else.
 
Prozac, Ambien, Amphetamine and Morphine.

Sounds like typical prescription drug abuser. 'Better living through pharmaceuticals'. Uppers in the morning, downers to go back to sleep.

His level of Zoldipem (Ambien) at 72ng/ml was significant. It's not uncommonly found in DUI arrests. Those drivers eventually wake up in county lockup and can't remember a thing.

I doubt that 'the drugs made him do it', they are just another sign that point to the underlying problem: bad judgement.
 
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F that, zero tolerance for prohibited drugs. I'm doubting he was under the influence of alcohol, but those other drugs aren't a result of death. If you can't follow the rules on drugs boys and girls, don't fly and make it harder for the rest of us.
 
Don't forget, our laboratory technology has risen to the level that we have the ability to detect miniscule amounts of drugs now.
So finding a drug does not necessarily equate to recent consumption nor especially, impairment.
They can probably find that last molecule of ethanol attached to only one of your billion liver cells, 2 months after your last drink.

Some are saying it is time these tox reports be accompanied by guidelines, so that the average reader is not misled by them.
Ie: "The samples contained 1 part per quadrillion of benadryl. The levels in the average person's tissues, one week after consuming the label dose of benadryl is 500ppm"

Well, since this is what I do for a living I have to point out that this is really erroneous information, and it is no more accurate than the guesses about what really caused the crash.

It is true that laboratory instrumentation can detect very low levels of many compounds, but regarding drugs there is ALWAYS a low-end cutoff of the analytical measurement range due to many factors. Very few assays are valid all the way to zero. Drugs (therapeutic or illicit) are often measured by detecting the metabolic products of the drug rather than the drug itself; for drugs which are directly measured any indicated value means it is above a low-end cutoff level, therefore it is present in a concentration high enough to be significant if it is not supposed to be there in the first place.
 
Is it erroneous that adding guidelines to the reports, suggesting whether a particular substance was likely a factor would be useful to the casual reader?
(Right now all I see are xx drug found at yy level. None have that. Many of the ethanol reports do not even mention that etoh is produced during normal decomposition of a corpse.)
It's simply misleading to put the lab findings in without a scale or guideline. "Indicates consumption of the medication in the last week but levels below that considered to impair by most state highway laws."

Here. It's like seeing in a report "Had a tiff with boss at work that day" or "mistress did not show last night" - the first thing a non-discerning reader will say is that the boss's tiff etc was a factor or worse, the cause. When there is no evidence to that fact.

Don't take this and run, thinking I am in favor of drugs in the cockpit, that would be a typical and very erroneous internet fail.
We just need better info in accident reports to help us know what the cause was. Right now, every pilot out there is thinking I won't Halliday it because I don't do drugs. WRONG!
 
http://www.kathrynsreport.com/2018/01/icon-a5-n922ba-registered-to-n529pg-llc.html

His blood levels for some of the drugs looked ridiculously high to me. It is my layman opinion that he should not have been flying.

I read/interpret tox reports frequently on my job...those ARE VERY HIGH AMOUNTS. Morphine (I think off the top of my head) starts to cause impairment at 15ng/ml...he was at 150ng/ml. Amphetamine level seems higher than normal for “clinical” as well.
 
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Is it erroneous that adding guidelines to the reports, suggesting whether a particular substance was likely a factor would be useful to the casual reader?

The autopsy report is not intended for the casual reader. It is intended for the ME to document his work. I appreciate that folks in the press got it released and published, but you do have know what you are looking at to draw conclusions beyond what the ME may have put on paper.
If you go through the entire thing, the report from the outside lab (NMS) actually provides reference ranges and comments of what ingestion amounts are required to explain the observed serum levels.
 
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Lol, decision making skills and lack of experience would be my bet
True, and we all know that being stoned out of your gord has no effect on decision-making.
 
the report from the outside lab (NMS) actually provides reference ranges and comments of what ingestion amounts are required to explain the observed serum levels.

Thank you for posting. I am glad to hear they are not just posting numbers anymore - which amounts to innuendo - and are posting 'what this means'.
 
Is it erroneous that adding guidelines to the reports, suggesting whether a particular substance was likely a factor would be useful to the casual reader?
(Right now all I see are xx drug found at yy level. None have that. Many of the ethanol reports do not even mention that etoh is produced during normal decomposition of a corpse.)
It's simply misleading to put the lab findings in without a scale or guideline. "Indicates consumption of the medication in the last week but levels below that considered to impair by most state highway laws."

Here. It's like seeing in a report "Had a tiff with boss at work that day" or "mistress did not show last night" - the first thing a non-discerning reader will say is that the boss's tiff etc was a factor or worse, the cause. When there is no evidence to that fact.

Don't take this and run, thinking I am in favor of drugs in the cockpit, that would be a typical and very erroneous internet fail.
We just need better info in accident reports to help us know what the cause was. Right now, every pilot out there is thinking I won't Halliday it because I don't do drugs. WRONG!

You really believe that blood is obtained so long after death that anaerobic decomposition has produced ethanol in significantly measurable amounts? Uh, there are time limits on how long after death the post mortem specimens may be obtained.

As far as “adding guidelines” to reports goes: if you don’t know what a test is for, or what its results indicate, then you’re goin* to need a lot more education than a short “guideline” can provide you. Shoot- why don’t babies start being born with a list of “guidelines” so society will stop raising idiots?

Toxicology reports after accidents are not verdicts on what caused the crash. Lab assay data are only data to be INTERPRETED by a professional. When Joe Internet reads such data, and he is ignorant about the science behind it, he tends to make uninformed conjecture and try to link data to events, or disprove those links because he had a cousin on Prozac that could drink a 12 pack and still fly an airplane like Tom Cruise in Top Gun. When a professional reads the same data they are able to interpret the results and understand medically significant details and how the data works with other information (like drug interactions, drug indications, etc) and use historical data to parallel the current investigation to look for common causalities.
 
Thank you for posting. I am glad to hear they are not just posting numbers anymore - which amounts to innuendo - and are posting 'what this means'.

Also, consider that sometimes the data itself is sort of a guideline. If the specimen is obtained a long time after death due to unavoidable delays, but the decision to work it up is still necessary, then your example of decomposition artifact (ethanol) can be a marker for interp because the urine alcohol might be zero, for example, which could indicate metabolic processes post mortem contributed to certain etoh results. Like an airplane, medical data needs a skilled, trained user to operate it responsibly, safely and accurately.
 
Thank you for posting. I am glad to hear they are not just posting numbers anymore - which amounts to innuendo - and are posting 'what this means'.
So the NTSB is responsible for gathering facts and reaching a probable cause. They're not in the 'what this means' business other than support for the probable cause. It's up to others (quite frequently unelected bureaucrats and politicians) to determine what this means.

An ME might ask a lab or expert 'what this means' but that may or may not be published. They will work against published standards - 'reference ranges' that you'd see on a medical lab report are the lab's range based on some kind of medical consensus which may or may not apply to the person/case at hand.i have had doctors look at a lab report, see that a particular value was 0.5 (unit of measurement) into the 'high' range and want to start treatment rather than confirming the result (and I've seen the confirming tests show well within range to almost ideal numbers). Too many factors affect the outcome to not do a second confirming test on a borderline reading.
 
True, and we all know that being stoned out of your gord has no effect on decision-making.

For the baseball player, apparently not, as he'd been quoted many times and seen in a few interviews saying he liked to fly low and fast "like a fighter pilot" which is also how ICON markets their planes and likely conducts their inhouse training for new inexperienced buyers, flying low and fast, that's exactly what he was doing when he crashed.

Stoned, sober, it's really just a rounding error when your default style of flying is best described as "full retard".
 
So the NTSB is responsible for gathering facts and reaching a probable cause. They're not in the 'what this means' business other than support for the probable cause. It's up to others (quite frequently unelected bureaucrats and politicians) to determine what this means.

An ME might ask a lab or expert 'what this means' but that may or may not be published. They will work against published standards - 'reference ranges' that you'd see on a medical lab report are the lab's range based on some kind of medical consensus which may or may not apply to the person/case at hand.i have had doctors look at a lab report, see that a particular value was 0.5 (unit of measurement) into the 'high' range and want to start treatment rather than confirming the result (and I've seen the confirming tests show well within range to almost ideal numbers). Too many factors affect the outcome to not do a second confirming test on a borderline reading.

Anecdotal example there. Some assays have normal reference ranges so small that a 0.5 (unit) deviation from normal can be dangerous. Depending on the treatment it may be far more negligent to wait for a new specimen to be tested and resulted than it is to treat now. Healthcare is not nearly as simple as some politicians will tell you. It can kill you.
 
Anecdotal example there. Some assays have normal reference ranges so small that a 0.5 (unit) deviation from normal can be dangerous. Depending on the treatment it may be far more negligent to wait for a new specimen to be tested and resulted than it is to treat now. Healthcare is not nearly as simple as some politicians will tell you. It can kill you.

Is A1c like that? Last spring mine was 6.3 and my doctor was getting all excited and about to unholster her prescription pad and I said, "Whoa there! Why don't I just stop eating three dozen cookies a day?" And I did and three months later it was 5.8. That's only a .5 unit difference but seems to be a big deal.
 
Is A1c like that? Last spring mine was 6.3 and my doctor was getting all excited and about to unholster her prescription pad and I said, "Whoa there! Why don't I just stop eating three dozen cookies a day?" And I did and three months later it was 5.8. That's only a .5 unit difference but seems to be a big deal.

Like many things in the human body, and the regulation or treatment thereof, it all depends on compliance. Sounds like you were partaking in a pretty poor choice of dietary intake of sugar, and your willingness to cut down had a positive effect. If you are a diabetic and your doc thought that you were doing your level best to eat well and exercise, and your A1C was still elevated, then perhaps chemical intervention would be beneficial. Too many variables (that are none of my business) for me to give you a straight answer.
 
I think he was having fun, I think the tox levels are probably irrelevant to the crash, and I think he made his choices. Real steep price to pay, but I bet he was smart enough intellectually to understand the risks, if not emotionally prepared to appreciate them. Beyond himself and his family, not a lot of harm done. GA impact? Not his responsibility to worry that far down the food chain.

I'm not advocating high-risk flying, but I'm good with someone making their own calls. Anyway, I don't think he was "stupid" - we all don't have the same priorities, and if one of his was adrenaline pumping, and taking some risks most of us wouldn't, so be it. We get too deep in other folks motive's and needs - not our business - he didn't plow it into an orphanage or a cruise ship (not that it would have kinetic energy to do much harm to either), and if we want a degree of freedom, we need to realize the definition is gonna take different forms.

A lot of fun activities can end in gruesome death, from ski slopes to jump planes to white water kayaking - safety shouldn't be (in my mind) anyone's "goal" - living fully ranks a lot higher.
 
<clip> safety shouldn't be (in my mind) anyone's "goal" - living fully ranks a lot higher.

What's the point, then? If you're not going to restrain your risk-taking just enough to live through it, then wouldn't it be considered suicide? Living fully may rank high, but dying fully means there's no more living at all.
 
I think he was having fun, I think the tox levels are probably irrelevant to the crash, and I think he made his choices.

What particular knowledge about the effects of the substances in his system makes you believe that they had nothing to do with his erratic behavior ?
 
What particular knowledge about the effects of the substances in his system makes you believe that they had nothing to do with his erratic behavior ?

Even if one doesn’t believe it impacted his judgement and that he was just an inherent risk taker, one should at least admit it impaired his ability to perform. Personally I believe both were impacted.
 
You really believe that blood is obtained so long after death that anaerobic decomposition has produced ethanol in significantly measurable amounts? Uh, there are time limits on how long after death the post mortem specimens may be obtained.


Certainly, it can 0.01% is pretty much down in the noise for even a LIVING person. If you want to determine what the likely peri-mortem BAC was, you need to look both at the EtOH but also where it was collected and what other metabolites are present.

I don't know what "time limits" you think exist in this case. They didn't fish Harnaday out of the gulf until the next day and the body didn't hit the ME for almost 24 hours from the time of the crash.
 
I think he was having fun, I think the tox levels are probably irrelevant to the crash, and I think he made his choices.

Tox levels irrelevant? Not sure how you get there.
 
It says his aircraft was "light sport category". Did he have a class 3 or was he flying under light sport?
 
It says his aircraft was "light sport category". Did he have a class 3 or was he flying under light sport?
He had a class 1 issued last May, according the FAA database.
 
Tox levels irrelevant? Not sure how you get there.
As in, it was part and parcel of the calls he made, the choices he made. Absent some unusual circumstance, likely he knew what he'd put in his body, likely had some concept of the effects. Not arguing, pro or con, on the chemical effects on his judgement - I do like he was mostly free to do so, whether the rest (or majority) of us approve.
 
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