Would you withhold your medical information from your employer for hundreds of thousands of dollars? Because that’s what’s happening here. A pilot career can cost more than $100k in training and years of doing work for what basically amounts to minimum wage. At the end of it you end up with a skill set that is very valuable, but not very transferable to other careers.
So let’s reframe it as: should we expect people to tell the truth about things that mostly don’t matter at a personal cost of their entire career, and all training costs?
If you disclose, you are punished severely and may never go to work again with almost no recourse by a system which largely ignores medical science. If you withhold, as almost all pilots are advised by colleagues and the doctors themselves to do, nothing happens. (When I went for an aviation medical, the doctor said: I’m not your family doctor, only answer the question I asked. If I need more information I can ask for it)
When faced by a system so perverse is it really all that unethical.
So let’s reframe it as: should we expect people to tell the truth about things that mostly don’t matter at a personal cost of their entire career, and all training costs?
If you disclose, you are punished severely and may never go to work again with almost no recourse by a system which largely ignores medical science. If you withhold, as almost all pilots are advised by colleagues and the doctors themselves to do, nothing happens. (When I went for an aviation medical, the doctor said: I’m not your family doctor, only answer the question I asked. If I need more information I can ask for it)
When faced by a system so perverse is it really all that unethical.