New York Times reporter Helen Ouyang authored the article linked below. The author is this website was interviewed by Helen in 2024 regarding my own personal situation with FAA medical and John Matthew Fabian being another David Altman, the quack that wrongfully grounded Karlene Pettette through the weaponization of FAA cognitive profiling. At the time of this publication I have not had a follow up conversation or interview with Helen on the article and that this is my raw interpretation of her article based on the data I personally possess on the subject and her presentation of the data.
Helen goes into great detail as to why pilots avoid doctors, and mental health practitioners like the plague. It is because any diagnosis handed out must be reported to the FAA, under the penalty of pergury. No diagnosis means no legal requirement to report and these diagnosis, even for something as minor as marriage counseling have lead to FAA groundings https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/magazine/airline-pilot-mental-health.html?unlocked_article_code=1.404.mebx.BUmf0axvPQv_&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
In response to the Germanwings tragedy, Senator Dianne Feinstein commissioned a report from the inspector general’s office at the Department of Transportation. Eight years later, its findings were finally released: Despite the F.A.A.’s comprehensive certification process, the agency’s ability “to mitigate safety risks is limited by pilots’ reluctance to disclose mental-health conditions.”
Well yeah because pilots don't want to lose their medicals. Helen also pointed out,
But few certification pathways, if any, are considered more complex or take longer than the one for mental illness. Pilots are taught early — by those who went before them, by those around them — that being honest with the F.A.A. about any aspect of their medical history can jeopardize their careers. Several years ago, an investigation by the Department of Veterans Affairs that cross-checked V.A. and F.A.A. databases revealed a wide discrepancy: Around 4,800 commercial and airline pilots were receiving V.A. disability benefits without reporting these medical issues to the F.A.A.
Something Joe LoRusso has a major issue with especially with the FAA being punitive against the veterans https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josephlegal_one-story-comes-to-mind-an-airman-who-recently-activity-7129321932738465792-vpgn An interesting statistic that Helen pointed out a study that stated 5% of aviation accidents came from unreported health disorders for 202 accidents, or 10 of the pilots. Contrast this with 0.18% caused by pilots with ADHD over a 15 year period and 4894 accidents documented by the NTSB and published in the NIH. the breakdown was 4 by known ADHD cases or 0.08%, and 5 of undiagnosed ADHD or 0.1% for a total of 9 pilots. Which is essentially statistically identical and that shows a ton of pilots have undiagnosed ADHD and that ADHD is statistically not a cause of accidents and should not be lumped in with the 5% that cause accidents. https://sites.google.com/site/no2cog/supporting-evidence/ntsb-data-shows-pilots-with-adhd-are-statically-unlikely-to-cause-accidents
Unreported health disorders can be deadly: A study of 202 fatal aviation accidents that occurred in the United States in 2015 found that in 5 percent of the cases, pilots had not disclosed the diagnoses or medications that were later implicated in the crash, most commonly including psychiatric drugs of some sort, whether taken by prescription or recreationally.
Every pilot I interviewed for this article knew of colleagues who had hidden their medical issues from the F.A.A.; some admitted to doing so themselves — several of whom told me that their supervisors had urged them not to report a health problem. And then there are the pilots who simply do not seek medical attention: A 2022 survey of pilots in the United States found that 56 percent of them reported having avoided health care in some way.
Because pilots are often reluctant to seek medical care or disclose health concerns, the number of those who are struggling with mental illness — a condition that is often easier to hide and harder to be open about than many other ailments — remains unknown.
Because they don't want to lose their medicals. the unknown is probably a high number, but statistically most of these pilots will have an entire flying career with no accidents or incidents that require a report to the NTSB. so why does the FAA take a 1950s stance to ground pilots, especially those that were labeled/tagged with ADHD as children where they could not refuse consent.
Though the minimum monitoring period is now six months and the list of medications has since expanded to eight, many pilots are still withholding their symptoms, reluctant to seek help and go through the F.A.A.’s onerous certification process around mental health.
Try years
A new spotlight was shined on FAA Medical after the mental breakdown of Joseph Emerson on the Alaska Airlines flight in the fall of 2023.
His case was a wake-up call for the industry. Renewed scrutiny was directed at the F.A.A.’s medical-certification process, and the National Transportation Safety Board was prompted to convene a mental-health safety summit. “Because a pilot’s work is safety-sensitive, they are held to a higher standard,” Susan Northrup, the F.A.A.’s flight surgeon since 2021, told me in an email. Her duty is to safeguard the broader flying public, she added, which supersedes the needs of individual pilots. The worry, though, is that the F.A.A. has inadvertently created a mental-health process so burdensome and restrictive that it deters pilots like Emerson from being honest with authorities and seeking help when they need it. Homendy, the N.T.S.B. chair, told me that a system that drives pilots to hide any symptoms of mental illness is “a detriment to safety.”
That's the best Northrup can say is that the the FAA's cognitive profiling process is an "inadvertent" burdensome and restrictive mental-health process? All the more reason she needs to be fired. paging DOGE. Homendy is spot on with stating that the FAA's system is broken and is driving pilots to not even address their mental health problems when they are minor, let alone fix them before they get to the point of no return and becomes a detriment to safety.
Helen also mentions that the FAA Cognitive profiling which falls under HIMS, a program that Joe LoRusso has called out that needs major reforms. https://sites.google.com/site/no2cog/supporting-evidence/aviation-attorney-joe-lorusso-tears-apart-the-hims-program Helen also labels this a "cottage industry" Not all pilots are so fortunate. Some of them, faced with the long process, are too discouraged to undertake it. Those who do may feel they need to turn to the cottage industry that has evolved to help pilots — often at significant cost — navigate this system. And for the pilots who make it through certification, the oversight doesn’t simply end. Merritt will continue to see his HIMS medical examiner and psychiatrist every six months. He has also had to divulge his mental-health diagnosis to his chief pilot, who submits quarterly progress reports to Merritt’s HIMS examiner.
At this point pilots are forced to take a gamble with neither outcome good,
lots who misrepresent their medical history to the F.A.A. risk as much as a five-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine. But for some, full disclosure can lead to what might feel like a different kind of punishment. When Elizabeth Carll was training to become an airline pilot, she reported to her medical examiner her history of anxiety. She had been off medication for more than a year. She had developed new coping skills — and, above all, she had aged out of her early 20s and past the angst that that time of life can bring. But the HIMS psychiatrist, whom she had met only once, declared that she needed to restart her anxiety medication if she wanted to fly. She recalls her doctor and her therapist being surprised. Carll also needed to hand over all her therapy notes to the F.A.A. “That is such an invasion of privacy,” Brent Blue, an aviation medical examiner for more than 40 years, says of the agency requesting therapy notes. “What business is it of the F.A.A. to have those kinds of details?”
Many pilots will in fact lie and feel its worth the risk of a five year prison sentence, quarter of a million dollar fine and felony conviction if it means not being grounded indefinitely and have to go through the hell of the FAA's cognitive profiling. Echoing Dr. Brent Blue, the FAA sould be barred from this type of health intrusion by HIPAA but it's not.
against the advice of her therapist, she released the notes from their sessions. “It just seemed like a never-ending process,” Carll says. In all, it took her about two and a half years to get her medical certificate. She has come to accept the medication’s side effects, but sometimes she feels foolish for not lying, as other pilots do, which could have enabled her to avoid so much trouble. “I feel like I brought it upon myself,” she says.
Then there's the subjective nature of mental health diagnosises where the diagnosis is often wrong.
Not only is mental illness often easier to conceal than physical ailments, many examiners are not trained in the medical specialties that frequently deal with psychiatric disorders. Even for experts, however, psychiatry lacks the precision found in other areas of medicine. There are no blood tests to diagnose depression, and there is no CT scan to confirm suicidal ideation. “We’re still struggling with that ambiguity,” says Thomas Insel, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Psychiatrists are left with the difficult task of making sense of what is not easily measured. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been fooled,” Allen Frances, the emeritus chairman of Duke University’s psychiatry department, says. “Well, first, I don’t know how many times I’ve been fooled because a lot of times when I’m fooled, I don’t know it.”
Then Helen covers ADHD
Suicide may be the most extreme concern, but other mental conditions also pose their own dilemmas for medical certification, such as A.D.H.D. Pilots who are prescribed medication to treat it are disqualified. But if they have been off treatment and satisfy certain criteria, they are allowed to fly. To Ned Hallowell, an A.D.H.D. expert, this situation is flawed: “The result is comparable to having a sky full of nearsighted pilots who are forbidden to wear corrective lenses.” (This F.A.A. allowance is intended for those who were “misdiagnosed” with A.D.H.D. or “‘grow’ out of it.”)
Ned Hollowell is wrong on so many levels. His analogy of "a sky full of nearsighted pilots who are forbidden to wear corrective lenses" claiming that well ADHD is a problem but the fix is a groundable offence comes across as obtuse and kind of offence. The FAA's "allowance: is smoke and mirrors. Brent Blue stated before the NTSB that its next to impossible to prove to the FAA that someone was misdiagnosed with ADHD https://sites.google.com/site/no2cog/supporting-evidence/ntsb-summit-dr-blue-says-cogscreen-has-no-connection-to-pilot-performance Susan Northrup states in the FAA's up in the air podcast that people "grow out of ADHD" she then immediately walks back that statement and justifies the Cognitive profiling https://sites.google.com/site/no2cog/supporting-evidence/example-of-faa-3rd-party-doctors-that-committing-malpractice-against-pilots/current-faa-flight-surgeon-tried-to-defend-this-before-the-pushback And we're beginning to see a body of science that says for the young kids that get this diagnosis, many of them truly grow out of it. But what do we need to do? Or how do we need to determine whether individual A has grown out of it where individual B has not? And teasing those out is one of the things we hope to do in the coming years so that we're limiting the expense at the same time, we're ensuring safety, because quite frankly, the last place you want somebody with an attention deficit, or distraction issue is in the air. Because we need them to be focused on what they're doing."
The streamlined ADHD evaluation is smoke and mirrors vaporware for any pilot that was forced to already take the subjectively graded Cogscreen. This author knows first hand since dealing with this since 2020.
All of this cognitive profiling falls under HIMS, the Human Intervention Motivational Study, a program that was originally set up to get alcoholic and substance abusing pilots sober and back to work. HIMS has morphed into something so bad that even Congress disapproves of this.
The F.A.A.’s concerns extend beyond determining which mental-health conditions should disqualify a pilot — they include deciding when such a pilot is ready to fly. Currently, the F.A.A. relies on HIMS to help make that determination. Not only does HIMS already have the structure in place to do these evaluations, it is also widely lauded in the airline industry and claims to have an 85 percent recovery rate treating pilots for substance abuse, its original mission. This apparent success rate led Congress to commission the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to study its effectiveness for possible use elsewhere. But the result was surprising: HIMS “doesn’t look that great, and it certainly doesn’t look like something you want everybody to emulate,” says Richard Frank, who is the director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on Health Policy and led the study.
The study’s report was released in 2023, stating that it found no solid evidence to support HIMS’s claims of success, which raises the question of why the program was adapted to evaluate pilots with mental-health conditions. The National Academies of Sciences committee had been denied access to the de-identified data and the testimonies of the pilots in HIMS, leaving its committee members to surmise that HIMS “did not really want to have a lot of scrutiny put on the actual performance of the program,” Frank says. “It made me less sanguine about flying.”
Now here are smoke and mirrors from the FAA
The F.A.A., amid calls for change, has implemented some reforms after the D.O.T. report commissioned by Senator Feinstein and Joseph Emerson’s episode pushed the agency to establish the Mental Health Aviation Rulemaking Committee. Last May, the F.A.A. adopted a fast-track pathway, one of the recommendations put forth by that committee. Pilots with certain mental-health conditions like anxiety, depression and PTSD who could not previously get a medical certificate from their regular examiners may now be able to receive one, provided they have been off psychiatric medication for at least two years. This means they can skip what Merritt went through: HIMS or other in-depth evaluations and the F.A.A.’s long review.
The smoke and mirrors is that if pilots were already forced into HIMS and forced to previously take the Cogscreen and were graded subjectively as a fail, they don't qualify.
Same for ADHD which Deputy Federal Air Surgeon says if a pilot can pass an instrument checkride including all the steps to get to that point, a pilot can hold concentration and is fit to fly, that fell on deaf ears. https://sites.google.com/site/no2cog/supporting-evidence/deputy-air-surgeon-wyrick-states-pass-an-instrument-checkride-you-are-safe
The smoke and mirrors cherade is so strong that many feel the FAA went to far with reforms.
Robert Noven, an internist who works full time as an aviation medical examiner, has reservations about the new fast-track pathway. “I actually think the F.A.A. has gone too far in the other direction on this policy,” he told me. “I think it’s going to open the door to people getting through who potentially have more serious mental-health conditions.” Noven currently cannot give clearance to a pilot who had kidney stones without, say, a urologist’s evaluation. But with the new pathway open, he can, without any psychiatric consultation, certify a pilot with a mental-health history. That worries him: “Is mental health less of a risk than a kidney stone?” When I asked Northrup about concerns like this, she replied, “We’ll adjust policy if needed.”
Once again the "fast-track" pathway is smoke and mirrors. The going to far from the FAA is a myth because they have not implemented any reforms. As of March 2025 none of the recommendations form the ARC Report have been implemented.
The F.A.A. may soon be loosening policy further, whether it wants to or not. The Mental Health in Aviation Act pending in Congress would force the agency to implement the Aviation Rulemaking Committee’s remaining recommendations. Some of these include reducing the minimum monitoring period after a pilot starts on antidepressants — to as few as two months from a half-year, closer to the time frames observed in Europe and Australia — and eliminating mandatory HIMS evaluations in uncomplicated cases. Another would-be change could potentially allow people being treated for A.D.H.D., which has been associated with fatal aviation accidents in the United States, to pilot planes. “If the public knew that the rules were being relaxed so much, they probably wouldn’t like it,” Noven says.
0.18% of the fatal accidents over a 15 year period. statistically safer than Toyota Cars and SpaceX rockets. All the pilots forced to take the clot-shots having heart attacks in the cockpit is a greater risk. BTW the Ford Mustang, Chevy Silverado and Jeep Grand Cherokee have been associated with fatal accidents yet there is no call to take these vehicles off the market. Noven is a fear monger. Would he say the same thing regarding DEI pilots that are not qualified to fly?
The Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn the 1984 Chevron doctrine may also have an effect on medical certifications. Until that ruling, the F.A.A. had essentially been the final authority on aviation-related issues; ambiguities related to medical certification were resolved by deferring to the agency. But the new ruling means that judges can, in theory, decide differently than the F.A.A. “I don’t know a single aviation attorney that isn’t excited,” Joseph LoRusso, a lawyer whom pilots have turned to when facing certification setbacks, told me.
Because this will allow pilots to sue the FAA in Judicial Branch Courts vs being forced to exhausted all options in the Executive Branch Administrative Courts which are often rubber stamps for the agencies themselves.
“Even with all the rules,” Noven says, “it really comes down to the person telling us the truth, and at the end of the day, we just cross our fingers and hope the people that aren’t telling us the truth don’t become a safety risk, because we can’t identify them.”
And if there was not the punitive threat, pilots would not report and honestly the skies would be safer.
His remarks speak to why the Aviation Rulemaking Committee seeks to ease restrictions: to encourage more pilots to be honest — and to not rely on luck at all to ensure safety. The committee’s recommendations would “allow people who currently would be considered not ready to fly, to fly,” Steven Altchuler, the psychiatrist on the committee, says. While letting these pilots fly may result in what he calls some “unmeasurable increase in risk,” he compares that unknown risk with the known safety of our current system. Until the recent collision in Washington, the United States hadn’t had a major fatal commercial airline crash since 2009, the longest-ever such period. Even so, he says, that unknown risk would be “more than compensated” by getting more pilots the help they need — pilots who might otherwise hide their psychological symptoms. If these pilots are willing to get treatment, under F.A.A. oversight, “the folks on the 10,000 other flights may end up doing better,” Altchuler says, by being even less likely to be involved in a crash. “That’s a trade-off.” After all, zero risk does not exist — unless you want to never fly.
Unmeasurable increase in risk admits that psychology is subjective because their data is not quantifiable.
Here's the reason why pilots don't open their mouths about this. Cognitive profiling has been weaponized. Just ask Karleen Pettitt.
When pilots do show signs of trouble, airlines have protocols for mandatory assessments. If pilots underperform in a flight simulator or are heard to make an alarming comment, the company can refer them for a “fitness to fly” evaluation, allowing doctors to address potential early warning signs. But these evaluations have also been misused to sideline pilots who raise issues with their airline companies.
One well-known case is that of Karlene Petitt, a Delta Air Lines pilot who in 2016 found herself subjected to a fitness-to-fly evaluation after she detailed potential safety issues in a 45-page report that she emailed to managers, including the chief executive. At least one issue — fatigue-related work-hour violations — was something that Delta was required to fix; another complaint accused management of following “a rigid chain of command.” She was soon told that she seemed mentally unstable and that her fitness needed to be assessed before she could fly again. Though she was based in Seattle, Delta sent her to a psychiatrist in Chicago named David Altman. Multiple messages and calls were exchanged between Delta’s counsel and the doctor, and the airline paid him more than $73,000 to do the assessment.
Delta bribed Altman to commit malpractice by falsely labeling Pettette with a mental disorder to have her medical revoked. Altman gave Petitt, at age 54, a first-time diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which all but ensured that she would never fly again. Altman based his decision on circumstances like Petitt’s addressing the chief executive by his first name in an email and her juggling work and night school while parenting young children. “I don’t know any woman who could do that,” Altman later gave as his explanation for the diagnosis.'
So Altman was a sexist
Petitt sought a second opinion from a panel of nine doctors at the Mayo Clinic — cost, $3,300 — who concluded that she did not, in fact, have bipolar or any other psychiatric disorder. A third expert also did not think Petitt had any mental illness. Petitt filed a whistle-blower complaint against Delta, alleging retaliation through its use of mental-health evaluations. The administrative law judge ruled in her favor, noting that it had been “improper” for Delta to “weaponize this process for the purposes of obtaining blind compliance by its pilots.” The judge also pointed out that Petitt’s piloting skills had never been questioned before. By then, Altman had already surrendered his medical license. Delta appealed the ruling, denying retaliation, but finally settled with Petitt in 2022. (When asked about the settlement, a spokesman called it a “business decision.”)
Altman was forced by the state of Illinois to surrender his medical license permanently as to save face from having the license permanently revoked.
Delta’s misuse of the mental-health evaluation has raised uncomfortable questions about how the airline industry handles mental health, especially when those evaluations appear to be used as a “management tool,” as the judge in Petitt’s case put it, rather than public safety. Not every pilot can fight back as Petitt was able to do. The airline “just needed to silence me,” Petitt told me recently. “They did it because they could.”
Same can be viewed about the FAA sending pilots to their hand picked mental health quacks to have their medicals revoked because of their outward political views and to meet DEI quotas.
“This case was big because it shed some spotlight on the shadiness that goes on,” LoRusso, the aviation lawyer, told me. When fit-to-fly assessments are mistrusted and seen as a way to fire a pilot, they can lose their safety value. Some pilots, after learning of Petitt’s experience, have chosen to avoid the evaluation altogether, moving to smaller airlines and accepting cuts in pay and position. And, the judge noted, Delta did not immediately share its findings with the F.A.A. — if Petitt were truly unsafe, shouldn’t she have been grounded rather than allowed, in theory, to work elsewhere?
The article concludes with Merritt questioning why some pilots are singled out but not others.
Merritt remains frustrated by how closely he is monitored compared with other pilots. The F.A.A. is “scrutinizing me just because I revealed a diagnosis,” he said. “Why are we not scrutinizing everybody’s cognition?”
The Answer is simple, the FAA would ground the vast majority of pilots and air traffic controllers because of how biased the FAA's cognitive profiling process really is. This is the part of the article which I feel Helen fell short on, by not going into details about how subjective the cognitive assessments are and that the Cogscreen was exposed as a subjective black box that has no bearing on determining a pilot's aeronautical decision making. Merritt stating not every pilot doesn't have to go through the Cogscreen shows that the process violates the equal protection clause, especially since which pilots are forced to go through this process is completely arbitrary.
This arbitrary nature is based on assumptions of safety risks but without actual hard data to back up the FAA's claims
The F.A.A. currently relies on a pilot’s diagnosis to make certain assumptions to try to predict safety risks. “So it’s a lot of deductive expert opinion,” says William Hoffman, a neurologist and aerospace medicine researcher with the U.S. Air Force — judgment instead of solid data, in other words. As far as Hoffman knows, no study has examined the performance of pilots with mental-health conditions.
Hoffman continues
If researchers could pair that data with accurate de-identified health records, they might discover that certain mental-health problems or the medications used to treat them don’t actually increase the number of small errors, errors that don’t cause so much as a bumpy landing but could indicate performance issues that may become future safety risks. Such information, Hoffman says, would be regarded as “the golden goose.” A 2024 F.A.A.-sponsored report by MITRE, a research-and-development nonprofit that advises government agencies, suggests that this kind of evidence could help steer medical certification away from its rigidity when focusing on mental-health diagnoses. But until then, the F.A.A. must make decisions without it, which means, from Northrup’s perspective, erring on the side of caution and continuing to subject pilots with these diagnoses to closer scrutiny. (Homendy, the N.T.S.B. chair, disagrees and urges immediate reforms: “You don’t need more data.”)
Homendy is right because we have decades of data that can be used right now and the FAA refuses to do so. Let me put it you this way, the Nation Transportation SAFETY Board is focused on safety and if the chair of the board feels that there is enough data to enact reforms without jeopardizing safety, ENACT THE REFORMS!!!! Time for DOGE to fire Susan Northrup. This is not unlike The Biden Administration continually extending the airline mask mandate until President Trump appointed Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck it down in April 2022.
Helen also points out that these exams are "snapshots in time" during the examination and cannot reflect the time a pilot is in the cockpit. No matter how comprehensive the F.A.A.’s medical screening process is, the evaluations are still only spot checks, snapshots of specific moments in a doctor’s office. The more relevant question, as Hoffman and his co-authors ask in a recent paper, is: “Can the pilot perform their duties safely at the time of operation?” Before getting into a cockpit, pilots are supposed to ask themselves the IMSAFE quiz, a set of six quick questions that include Am I Stressed? Am I Fatigued? Am I Emotionally upset? But the pilots I spoke with don’t put much thought into it, if they do it at all.
What seems to be proposed is some type of electoric watchdog all pilots might have to wear. This seems a little to big brother.
Scientists are also exploring technology-based screenings — possibly using biowearables that track heart-rate variability and subtle skin changes, for example — to assess pilots’ mental states before flights. But doctors agree that while such tech is promising, it isn’t ready yet for commercial aviation. Real-time screenings could bring new uncertainties to flight operations — delayed or canceled flights, higher fares — that the public may resist. If they work as intended, though, these screenings could be used for all pilots, not just those who report mental-health conditions, and might even bar someone like Emerson from the cockpit before a flight takes off.
Now a review summery
The article written by Helen Ouyang, MD, MPH for the New York Times Magazine does a fairly good deep dive onto how broken FAA Medical is.It does a deeper dive that the NYT documentary on FX but there is still some glaring omissions such as not listing the Cogscreen.
PART 1 Helen Ouyang, MD, MPH documents in detail why pilots are afraid to see doctors in general, such as any and all diagnoses have to be reported to FAA Medical even for the most minor of case, and many of those are considered groundable conditions due to FAA Medical uses obsolete decades old diagnosis criteria. HIPAA does not protect pilots from non-disclosure whether deliberate or unintentional overlooking and the FAA is punitive regarding this, not just permanent loss of medical certificates and revocation of pilot ratings, but also a $250,000 fine and felony conviction of perjury that could land a pilot or air traffic controller in federal prison for up to five years. Even with vague reporting instructions given out by the FAA which other governmental entitles have known about since 1987 with Broderick Memorandum
PART 2 Ouyang also goes into detail that process of getting a medical with any mental health labeling or treatment is so burdensome and restrictive that it deters pilots from dealing with it where the irony it can become an serious detriment to safety. Helen even uses the term "cottage industry" with regards to pilots have to pay out of pocket to try with no guarantees of getting their medical certificates back and that this has become such a serious issue that the NTSB held a "Safety Summit" regarding this in December 2023.
PART 3 Where the article falls short is going into detail of what is so burdensome and restrictive, and that is the subjective cognitive assessments that the FAA uses including the Cogscreen which is a subjectively graded back box test the FAA uses as an "on off switch" regarding if a pilot gets a medial or not according to a couple of the articles Dr. Brent Blue published in AOPA. Dr. Blue was interviewed for the article but his views of the Cogscreen was not included nor was the Cogscreen even mentioned nor was the subjective nature of how the Cogscreen and other tests in the FAA test stack. This includes not mentioning previous NTSB Vice Chair Bruce Landsberg statement at the NTSB Safety Summit that, "If you torture the (test) data enough, you'll get it to confess to anything" so lets say the FAA 3rd party practitioner wants a pilot to fail to hold them hostage to the cottage industry where the practitioner financially enriches themself at the pilots' expense, they can do this knowing they can get away with on several factors
PART 4 Not every pilot is forced to go through this, only those that the FAA feels needs to which is a violation of the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause. The test. scoring and "norms" are a blackbox. FAA more or less admitted at the NTSB Safety summit these tests are subjectively graded, there is very little if any science that backs up these tests claims, and are used outside of their design scope. Also it sure seems that most people score in the bottom 15% which is the what is claimed for those to not be allowed to have an FAA Medical. The test creator has had random pilots take the Cogscreen for free anonymously with no risk to their medicals and have results averaged together with the original test data destroyed. This hides the peaks and valleys of what the real results are so the average is not indicative of a human's performance. Also to point out if the Cogscreen really was about safety, why are those testing to create this average not at risk of losing their medicals and be grounded if they in fact score certain parts in the "averaged" bottom 15%. Also what DEI norms are factored into this subjective grading? paging DOGE
PART 5 At least one high profile case of FAA Medical weaponization has been reported on and that being the case against Delta Airlines safety whistleblower Karlene Petitt PhD, MBA, MHS where Delta Airlines paid David Altman, a them psychiatrist in the state of Illinois over $73,000 to falsely label Petitt with bipolar disorder. It took Petitt many years of her life and many thousands of dollars to prove with different high profile doctors that what Dr. Altman did was take a bribe to commit malpractice. Most pilots don't have the financial resources of the braveness to even think about fighting their cases. Even though Joseph LoRusso of Ramos Law was interviewed for this article, the statement he made on the Pilot's Pandemic podcast of pilots are afraid to say anything for the fear of losing the (false) hope over getting their medicals back was not included in the NYT article. The State of Illinois eventually forced Dr. Altman to permanently relinquish his medical licenses, however Altman is not an isolated bad apple either.
PART 6 It turns out that the state Illinois has one of the better enforcement arms of its medical board, contrast this with Texas where until the Emmy award winning investigative report by Austin TX NBC Affiliate KXAN exposed that the Texas Medical Board only had a voluntary disclosure of a practitioners past, meaning Altman could have moved down to Texas and got a medical license with no questions asked. The TMB doesn't cover non-medical doctor mental health specialists. They are covered by a relatively new agency called the Behavior Health Executive Council in 2019. The irony is the bill that created BEHC was authored by Alfonzo "Poncho" Navarez who only a few months later was arrested for dropping a envelope with his Texas Capital letter that was full of cocaine outside of his Cessna aircraft at KAUS. If BHEC is anything with the Texas Department of insurance, a captured regulatory agency that protects its license holders, especially hiding the fact the agency doesn't want to admit its standards were broken to begin with any sanction would admits the agencies shortcomings of admitting they should not have granted a license to begin with.
PART 7 For example ever get rear-ended in Texas, have the crash deemed 100% the other parties fault, then have the insurance company such as Liberty Mutual lie in the settlement negotiations about totaling the vehicle over cosmetic damage, then ask for the copy of the settlement agreement sent over and instead the insurance company executes branding the title, even having the title branding backdated a couple of times including several months before the crash happens which is both insurance and title fraud and TDI tells you to pound sand being left with a vehicle with only cosmetic damage not affecting its safety and being branded with a salvage title that can't be registered. The Texas DMV saw this and did a pivot where instead of the "Cogscreen of inspections" all a branded vehicle has to do is pass the standard vehicle inspection to be re-branded as rebuilt and registerable to legally drive on the road.
This type of pivot NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy seems to endorse with regards to FAA Aeromedical Reform. While current FAA Federal Air Surgeon keeps claiming that "more data needs to be gathered" this in reality a stall tactic because the data gathered over the past few decades shows the FAA's current policy is unsafe.
PART 8 The decades of data clearly shows that the FAA's current policies are making the skies less safe. FAA Federal Air Surgeon Dr. Susan Northrup's stance only seems to be a stall tactic to protect the cottage industry. Paging DOGE. I would trust the chair of the agency charged with safety's quote in the article urging reform because that will make the skies safer. With insurance, Medicare/caid not covering these subjective cognitive assessments, and with state licensing boards being enablers leaving the only legal recourse of going after these quacks in civil court, (good luck) and since Dr. Altman is not the outlier but the norm with the hand picked FAA quacks, there is real need for congressional reform. Please contact every member's office, of the House Aviation Subcommittee, Transportation Chair Sam Graves's office, and DOGE Caucus co-chairman Pete Sessions's Waco office and ask for Stanton Bain. Tell them check rides are a suitable gauge to a pilot's aeronautical decision making, not these subjectively graded cognitive assessments. The status quo is relying on pilots and air traffic controller's silence and pilot's and air traffic controllers needs not be silent no more in the age of DOGE