Some disturbing news is being reported this week at Breitbart involving the safety of commercial airline flights. As it turns out, despite the fact that we are still dealing with a serious shortage of pilots in the aviation industry, the situation may be getting worse. The FAA and the NTSB have been reviewing the records of pilots for several years now and it turns out that hundreds of pilots may have lied about their medical records and been flying while dealing with medical conditions that should have disqualified them from flight. Making matters worse, or at least more complicated, the FAA has apparently been looking through veterans’ medical records to obtain this information. So there’s enough bad news to go around for everyone in this story.

The Washington Post broke the news that nearly 600 of those pilots being investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) fly planes for passenger flights and over 4,800 are veterans receiving disability benefits…

Data collected by the National Transportation Safety Board shows that pilots’ medical issues were the cause of 9 percent of fatal aviation accidents from 2012 to 2022.

This is from the original WaPo article:

The pilots under scrutiny are military veterans who told the Federal Aviation Administration that they are healthy enough to fly, yet failed to report — as required by law — that they were also collecting veterans benefits for disabilities that could bar them from the cockpit.

Veterans Affairs investigators discovered the inconsistencies more than two years ago by cross-checking federal databases, but the FAA has kept many details of the case a secret from the public.

An FAA spokesperson admitted that the records of roughly 4,800 pilots had been under review and at least 60 of them had their licenses “temporarily suspended” while the investigation proceeded. One veteran failed to disclose that they were collecting disability for post-traumatic stress disorder. (But he also failed to disclose six criminal convictions, so he probably shouldn’t have been flying anyway.)

On the one hand, we clearly don’t want pilots lying on their applications about medical conditions that could make them unsafe to carry passengers around the country. But at the same time, we also don’t want people scouring through our veterans’ medical records, so this creates something of a conundrum. Some of them clearly seem to have lied, however.

But that brings us to the second half of that equation. The FAA and Veterans Affairs were only looking into the records of commercial pilots who are veterans because those were the only records they had access to. The rest of the pilots who obtained their training through civilian institutions don’t have such sensitive medical records tucked away inside of the government and HIPPA doesn’t allow for such disclosures. How many of those pilots lied? One aviation attorney quoted in the report claims that it is “an open secret that 85 percent of pilots lied about or failed to disclose medical issues.”

I’m sure that’s making all of us feel a lot better. So the vast majority of the pilots flying the public around could potentially have disqualifying medical conditions that they kept hidden? But how are such pilots getting away with this? We’re supposedly not running all of this on the honor system. I did some checking and found that commercial pilots are required to take an aviation physical every year from an aviation medical examiner and obtain a Class 2 Medical Certificate that must be reported to the FAA. Shouldn’t the FAA have caught those discrepancies immediately?

And that brings us to the final question that crossed my mind reading this story. It’s been confirmed by multiple sources that the FAA has been aware of this situation for at least two years. But they never released this information to the public. Doesn’t this seem like a rather important detail that the government should let the public know about if it could impact their safety and endanger people’s lives when they fly? I realize the House Oversight Committee has a lot on their hands these days, particularly with all of the Hunter Biden craziness, but somebody from the FAA needs to be brought in to answer some questions.