Where's that thread that said 3rd Class reform was only six months away? I want to go revive it again and ask if it happened. Heh.
We are a nation in love with debt-driven bureaucracy. It's the only way to attach one's "success" to a debt machine so big, that if you saved a million dollars a DAY from 1/1/0001, you'd still come up 17 TIMES that amount, short of paying it off. And it goes up every year by more than that amount.
It's just business and numbers. Nobody is going to slow that roll. Everybody wants a piece of that action, and will give the flimsiest reasoning possible to get access to it.
It's not even about the money anyway, the debt money just makes it possible. It's about centralized control and power.
All one has to do to add sanity back to the equation... Take the absolute worst case scenario costs and divide it by say, 10% just for a number you're willing to spend to mitigate but not eliminate that risk.
If the operating cost of the entire bureaucracy costs more than the worst case scenario, it ain't worth doing.
So let's say one in one hundred 3rd Class pilots comes screaming out of the sky, dead at the controls, and hits a bus load of children and nuns in a school parking lot...
Which of course is insanely high.
And we're willing to pay 10% of that cost to mitigate it but not eliminate it...
How much smaller should the bureaucracy be?
Keep in mind that there's less than 200,000 pilots who don't have a certificate to fly for hire in the US. That'd be 2000 nun-kid-bus crashes a year in the absolute worst case scenario I presented above, which is already a completely ludicrous number to start with. Let's assume 90% of those don't harm any children, school busses, or nuns, and you're talking a pretty massive bureaucracy to eliminate 200 crashes a year.
No worries. At that rate, we'd be out of old affordable airplanes for all the people so sick they didn't know they were sick (and unable to apparently answer the common sense question, "Don't you think you're too sick to fly that thing?", in no time.
"Safety" is the self-licking ice-cream cone of bureaucracy once you're into single digit accident rates caused by medical conditions. The chances a typical 100 hour a year non-commercial pilot are going to harm the masses, are already nearly nil before you even do the math on the costs to mitigate it.
For comparison, there were just over 32,000 fatal automotive crashes in the US in 2014, down from a peak in the high 50s in the early 1970s.
We'd have to kill off more than 10% of the non-Commerical pilot population every year to match the risk the public takes every day in their cars, overall, and to make the risk analysis accurate, they'd all have to have some sort of debilitating medical issue in-flight.
Why come back to cars for numbers? The public is pretty clueless overall about how many billions of miles commercial drivers serve them with, compared to that industry's bad apples too.
The cold numbers seem to indicate that we spend way too much time and energy on things that don't happen. We already know the vast majority of aviation accidents are loss of control and poor weather decision making skills. And yet we spend money on medical stuff at a far greater percentage than the stuff that'll actually kill us, or harm someone outside of recreational aviation.
Putting all the fat pilots on CPAP machines won't make them better pilots and attack the 80%+ of real flying risk. Especially recreational pilots who don't have a demand-based flying schedule who can easily say, "I don't feel well enough to mess around with a hobby today."
It's an incredible "machine" to guard against an incredibly tiny public risk from only 200,000 Citizens.
But hey... We're now screening everyone through TSA, an even lower risk to the public before they can fly a Cessna 150.
Like I said, we're in absolute love with bureaucracy. It's way beyond the point of diminishing returns. Way way beyond it.
Want better proof than my silly numbers? Ask an insurance actuary how many non-commercial pilots are going to die or be incapacitated in aircraft this year from a medical condition which will trigger an insurance pay out.
Ask them how many more if the 3rd Class were simply eliminated.
In a pool of only 200,000, I bet it won't be many. I think we can all handle the insurance bump if we could get the money back spent on the bureaucracy. Which we won't. It'll still be spent. Maybe on better training to cover that real "loss of control" problem, or "weather decision making" skills?
The performance of the pilot is way more risky than the performance of their bodies. See YouTube for proof.
