re: #402 Weet

New Rule: People suffering from psychological maladies are not allowed to pilot commercial airlines.

I’m empathetic with people who suffer such, but we give tremendous power-over-others’-lives to pilots.

Pilot are NOT given psychological testing or evaluations. This needs to change. I was shocked at this. I think there are just some jobs that should have advanced and thorough psyche exams. Not that we really know how to evaluate everything, but something is better than nothing.

When they apply, they take some kind of simple personality test, and that’s that. There are no formal psyche exams.

reuters.com

As long as the evaluations are designed to do nothing more than identify those pilots who pose a danger to their passengers I’m all for it. There’s a tendency in situations like this one for companies to over react and the consequence of that might be to deprive capable pilots who, for instance, suffer from all-too-common mild depression of their jobs. Finally, I think that some of those poor individuals who are most deeply disturbed have an uncanny knack for gaming the system.