by
Darryl Phillips
Imagine this: You are cruising along a highway which has a posted limit of 65 MPH. Being a safe and cautious driver, you are holding a steady 63. You are obeying all the rules, yet a cop pulls you over and issues a speeding ticket for being 13 MPH over his personal limit of 50. When you argue to the judge that it happened in a 65 zone, he trots out a law that says the speed restrictions are "not limited to" the posted number!
What if that applied to all the rules? Wouldn't the IRS love it if their take was "not limited to" the amount on your 1040? What if all the agencies were "not limited to" what the law allows?
But America doesn't work that way, or at least it wasn't supposed to. Our Constitution is a set of bounds on what government may do.
Unfortunately for aviation, the FAA doesn't respect those bounds. They're really into this "not limited to" kick. The Bob Hoover experience got their juices up, they've discovered that the courts will go along with "not limited to" if they can cloak it in the flag of safety.
I'm not going to re-hash the whole Bob Hoover thing here, suffice it to say that the FAA really had fun with the concept of "not limited to". When Bob passed all their tests, FAA just came up with more. When he satisfied the physicians, different doctors were brought in. Every time he passed, FAA claimed that the tests weren't conclusive. Eventually somebody found something that Bob couldn't do, and that became the standard he couldn't meet. The qualifications for Bob were "not limited to" the standards published for the rest of us.
Next time it won't be Bob Hoover. It might be me. Or you.
The proposed major re-write of Part 67 is chock full of "not limited to". No less than 15 places! Can you believe that? "Mental standards for a third-class airman medical certificate include, but are not limited to", "Eye standards......are not limited to", "Ear, nose, throat, and equilibrium standards....are not limited to", "Neurologic standards....are not limited to", Cardiovascular standards....are not limited to", and so on. And on. There are plenty of standards, many of them are bad enough for the airline pilot but absolutely absurd for the weekend VFR flyer. But the published medical standards don't matter if the FAA can come up with tighter requirements anytime they feel like it. Just like speed limits, the standards should be posted and enforced and not subject to the individual whim of a cop or an AME or even the Federal Air Surgeon. That's not the way this country works.
If we had wanted to live under that sort of law, we could have yielded to Hitler, we could have surrendered at Pearl Harbor, we could have saved a lot of lives by just caving in. But we chose to fight those awful wars because freedom is worth it.
Aviators, I believe, have a particularly difficult time challenging the government. Partly it's because so many of them are/were part of the government. A large number of today's pilots were trained under the G.I. Bill, many more learned to fly in the military. They were trained to respect the chain of command and to follow absurd rules without question. But that is only part of the problem.
As pilots, we've also been trained to believe the gages. In the soup it's absolutely essential to trust the gyros rather than the inner ear. If the instruments indicate that we are right side up, then we must believe it even if vertigo is saying something else. If airspeed is low and the altimeter is climbing, we have to believe that we are going up even if equilibrium is saying something else.
And it's not just the gages, we have to believe ATC too. When told to turn left, heading 270, we do it. After all, the controller has his radar, he can see the other traffic, he knows where the mountains are. We have a unspoken contract with that voice on the ground. We will obey, he will take care of us.
It's a very small step from trusting ATC to trusting FAA. Would they write medical standards for all the other pilots and then use more stringent standards for you? Would they treat Bob Hoover that way?
Even if nothing else is changed in the Part 67 revisions, the phrase "not limited to" must be eliminated. It makes a mockery of all the rules. It gives future FAA officials the legal power to revoke or deny certificates for any reason, or for no reason at all.
The deadline for comments is February 21. Mail them, in triplicate, to: Federal Aviation Administration, Office of the Chief Counsel, Attention: Rules Docket (AGC-10), Docket No. 27940, 800 Independence Avenue, SW., Washington DC 20591.
Did you ever think that it should be FAAA? There is an "Anti" in there somewhere.