Originally Posted by
compressor stall
This should be warning for many parents who might have a child that exhibits ASD tendencies but is borderline.
Do you want to give your child that baggage, permanently on his/her my health record that could cause this kind headache in the future? Get the support and social skills training needed to let them succeed, but a diagnosis won’t change them. There are a hell of a lot of highly successful folk with ASD. Some of them good pilots too. Some probably not. Just like any other humans. Some can fly, and some can’t. That form 420 is incredible. Even an attempt at humour half way down.
So true...but there are parents out there who either see it as some kind of fashionable tag, are after NDIS funding, or want to drug their children into "normality" instead of allowing them to develop their gifts and excel in the things they are interested in. Students of mine, absolute geniuses and excellent pilots, one of whom could describe every system in a space shuttle to the last detail, have not been able to get a medical because of this, thier parents and CASA have robbed them.
My first thought was also that it had come from some kind of dumbed down article about the behaviour of children who are bored in school. The first person I was asked to fill it in for was a gentleman his late sixties who had been an instructor for decades and was now going to lose his medical unless someone could answer the questions, but as I had never flown with him I couldn't do it. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and had no traits remotely resembling anything on there and I had known him for years.
Without people on the spectrum, we would probably still be living in caves. We certainly wouldn't be using computers connected to the internet. They are not freaks, it is not a "disorder", they are the next stage of evolution and denying them the chance to be pilots because of an arbitrary test done by unqualified people is so wrong. Importantly, these people are not risk takers, they are not going to hurt anyone, they might not want to make small talk on the flight deck but why should that exclude them?
CASA would have grounded Neil Armstrong!