'If you aren't lying, you aren't flying.' Pilots hide mental health struggles (reuters.com)

I firmly believe that people should be able to pay cash to get mental health treatment anonymously.

If the provider doesn't know you're a pilot -- or even your real name -- they can't report you.

Tricky problem. I sympathize with pilots here, but the zero-risk approach has worked very well for fliers in aggregate.

Until we have many redundant layers of backup, the risk of drugging copilot and going down is a non zero risk that triggered many of these policies.

Reminds me of an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff in which fighter pilots perceived doctors as the enemy, and heaven forfend you saw a psychiatrist!

  A man could go for a routine physical one fine day, feeling like a million dollars, and be grounded for fallen arches. It happened!—just like that! (And try raising them.) Or for breaking his wrist and losing only part of its mobility. Or for a minor deterioration of eyesight, or for any of hundreds of reasons that would make no difference to a man in an ordinary occupation. As a result all fighter jocks began looking upon doctors as their natural enemies. Going to see a flight surgeon was a no-gain proposition.

I’m impressed the article managed to not mention Nathan Fielder even once.

Xyla Foxlin the YouTuber had some good wins against this recently - including getting legislation passed. Her wings got clipped due to IUD related depression

This kind of don’t ask don’t tell stuff is fine. You want to have a test where passing it is being smart enough to be able to simulate being clean.

In general, this principle works for lots of things. Drug use at your office job? No problem so long as I can’t tell you’re on drugs. And so on and so forth.

The alternative isn’t some clean job. It’s where people who are incredibly stupid and scatterbrained have a “reasonable accommodation” and then you’re on a plane run by a fucking moron so that when the other competent pilot falls ill the moron will have to fly it by himself and then you all die.

You thought you had 2x redundancy? Well one of the machines was always failing. No thanks. Let’s keep doing what we’re doing.