CASA has issued me a medical certificate.
As noted above, AVMED must have been making it up when it said:
Please be advised, CASA is unable to make a risk assessment for your fitness to return to flying until 12 months has elapsed following your embolisation procedure.
As I also noted above, surprising as it may seem to AVMED these days, even AVMED is subject to both the laws of physics and man-made laws. Not only
could they assess, they were
obliged by law to assess.
AVMED seems to me to believe that they have to act lawfully only after someone insists they do. They only complied with the law in this case because I took them on. This is not the first occasion on which I have had to press AVMED to act lawfully.
An organisation that only acts lawfully when pressed to do so seems to me to be one with little-to-no corporate integrity. The tediously repetitive claims to be acting in the interests of the safety of air navigation is, in my view, merely a form of ‘noble cause corruption’. AVMED is, in my view, just a bunch of non-specialists who’ve been able to arrogate to themselves judgments they are not qualified to make, simply because they have the power of certification. And we have the Mafia-like threat implicitly made in an earlier post by nowluke: If you don’t comply with AVMED it could be bad for your health.
I repeat what the Uber-specialist said in his report, about AVMED’s judgments:
“To impose arbitrary, essentially non-scientific qualifications on fitness to fly, appears contradictory to CASA’s commitment to impose rigorous scientific techniques to its assessment of pilots.”
“Arbitrary rules, based on pseudoscience from small case series”.
“Speculative risks based on poor quality data taken from small number surveys that have no relevance when applied to a single case.”
I despair at the fact that had this happened around the time I was working in CASA, the response of AVMED would have been: Well done in following up a potential medical issue ‘when in doubt’ and for getting the DAVF treated. Because your treating specialists say the procedure was a success, confirmed by subsequent scans, and because Australia’s foremost specialist in the area agrees, your medical certificate is no longer suspended. Go forth and fly safely. Because you’re obviously a responsible adult and you take these matters seriously, we know you’ll act on your specialists’ advice as to follow-up tests, if and as necessary.
CASA now wants the AAT proceedings to go away - move on everyone, nothing to see here. Not so fast, CASA... I reckon I’m owed a refund of the application fee to the AAT (as I got the last time I took CASA on by applying to the AAT) because the only reason you issued me with a medical certificate is that I took you on in the AAT. The application fee is not a small sum: $920. However, I could be wrong as there was a stay hearing. I’ll leave this issue to my lawyer.
I’ll get to a comprehensive post about lessons learned in a few weeks, but at this point I’ll note another one: We should all take them on every time they make a decision we don’t like.
All of us.
Every time.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and folks of other genders] to do nothing. Edmund Burke