I wonder if the airlines really want section 3, and are concerned that if class three medical reform is passed separately, they will loose the backing of the EAA and AOPA and have to lobby for themselves.
I went back and looked over section 3 (
https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/571/text) and it definitely looks like ALPA members would have gotten benefit from it. But then I found that Aerospace Medical Association back in April noted ALPA's objection even to PBOR2:
http://www.asma.org/asma/media/AsMA...ical-Certification-Legislation-April-2015.pdf
So it appears ALPA has been opposed to PBOR2 for quite a while - or at least to the relaxation of Class 3 medicals.
By the way, I found the arguments put forth by AsMA interesting and worth closer examinations:
"The FAA’s Medical Analysis Tracking (MANTRA) Program maintains a registry of US pilots fatally injured in aircraft accidents and includes autopsy results for most cases. Data were extracted for 1,084 individuals involved in fatal accidents from January 2011 to April 2014. Subjects included 68 sport pilots flying legally without a medical certificate and 403 pilots flying with an FAA Third Class medical certificate. Moderate to severe medical hazards identified by autopsy were found in 25% of medically certified pilots but in 60% of uncertified pilots."
This is hardly surprising - in fact it is to be expected. The issue isn't whether sport pilots would be as healthy as private pilots when they die in a crash, but whether their state of health was causal to the crash. I'm sure if that claim could be made they would make it. They didn't. What they then state is:
"According to recent studies by Casas and Castro, pilots with FAA Third Class medical certificates have a lower accident rate than sport pilots who have no such certification."
Sport pilots also may attain their certificates with lower number of hours and fly a different class of aircraft than that available to private pilots. Nice try, though, at trying to imply a causal link. An honest scientific approach would have noted the confounding factors.
The following was, in my opinion, almost the best argument they made:
"Based on a study of driving statistics by Hendricks, et al., 1999, approximately 6.4% of driving crashes resulted primarily from driver incapacitations. According to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), this type of bill would affect 39,120 pilots. If the same 6.4% incapacitation rate occurs for pilots under driving license medical standards, up to 2,503 new aircraft accidents would occur."
But then I looked at the linked study, where it defines its categories, and found this: "
INCAPACITATION (e.g. fell asleep) - 6.4%"
[EDIT: According to the
study results, the 6.4% is the percentage of drivers contributing to causation, not 6.4% of crashes. In fact the original study says that 2% of driver contributed crashes were due to seizures and blackouts; 4.4% were due to falling asleep. Since driver contributed crashes accounted for 59.7%, the final tally for medical incapacitation as causal for accidents amongst drivers was .597*2 = 1.2%. And contrary to the bogus math used by the AsMA, you DO NOT multiply either 6.4% (or 1.2%) by the number of pilots to determine the increase in accidents. You multiply by the number of past accidents. In fact the number of accidents would increase only by 1.2% (or even 6.4% using their numbers.) An increase of about 15 new accidents a year, of which 3 would be fatal. NOT 2,503. That latter results from confused or deliberately deceptive math by the AsMA - their probability units are wrong.]
So they were reaching. Hard. Those kinds of "scientific" arguments probably have worked on a lot of congress people, though. On the pro side for relaxation of medical standards is the realization that risk is impossible to remove - the best one can do is find a balance between risk to others versus the benefits of freedom to act.
