Over 3,000 Sign a Petition to Fix the Airmen Medical System

As of late April, more than 3,300 people have signed a petition urging the Federal Aviation Administration to revise its airmen medical system. This aims to prevent more seemingly small medical events from taking months to years out of pilots’ careers.

“The FAA is tasked with ensuring our skies are safe, and they do a great job at it, but there is something about the system that is holding up the medical process,” the petition stated. “Obviously, there are rules and regulations that they must adhere to, but it ends up putting pilots on the end of the whip.”

The petition, titled “Safer Skies! Fix the FAA Medical Process,” was organized by Deirdre Gurry. She is one of many to have been screwed over by the airmen medical system, having been diagnosed with cancer several years ago. Despite a relatively quick treatment and recovery process that got her ‘cancer free’ within three months, Gurry was out of work for more than nine months as she waited to receive medical approval from the FAA. In the meantime, her questions were met with a lot of the same unhelpful answer: “Your status is pending.”

As frustrating as this was, countless others have been in similar or worse situations. It can take FAA medical examiners years before authorizing pilots to return to the skies.

This extensive wait could be chalked up to simple overcrowding, which wouldn’t be hard to believe considering medical applications are currently at an all-time high. However, not making time to sort through applications is no excuse for the months or years that perfectly healthy pilots are kept from their jobs.

“Congress needs to address this immediately, and help the FAA get back on track, since this issue has been seen for many years and the problem only continues to grow as more and more pilots and controllers are needed for aviation,” the petition continued. “We need to dig in and figure out exactly what is causing these backlogs, and what can be done to fix them.”

With the FAA actively working to improve the medical system, these wishes may actually come true. The agency is currently seeking public comments on ways to speed up and change the airmen medical certification process. It even recently took some outside advice, withdrawing proposed changes to the medical application system that would’ve issued an immediate denial to anyone who failed to submit full exam results or other required information.

FMI: www.change.org