"Rather then the calendar, I think some education is needed. We have to do annual briefs (15-45 mins), its a pain, but you do walk away with a better understanding."
Exactly my thinking too. What use is a
PR exercise of a shoddy peice of un-informative paper where the situation becomes more and more clouded. The common sence rule should apply, and to anyone who "tries to poke holes in the rules" I am sure they will.
I just think that there should be a zero tolerance attitude to flying and drugs, as I was always taught, you were never to commence duty or flying "if under the influence of a drug that may impair judgement/thinking". Aviation in my eyes is not part of drug taking culture, and excluding some rouge elements of the industry, never had the capacity to harbour it. The catalyst for this
PR spin was a set of unfortunate events of pilots that "may" have been under the influence of drugs in the previous 2 days or more.
I honestly think you are an idiot to risk your licence with alcohol let alone drugs. If more emphasis had been put into curbing the culture of these rouge elements and proactive thought processes rather than reactionary "look at me I am doing something, and now have given everyone a piece of plastic, therefore they will not do drugs" stunt, then maybe I would not be so picky as to thier ruling.
You are quite right in saying that this process is not aviation specific, and I think it is a good implementation, but fear they reasons for which it was implemented and how the"authorities" have gone about it is a sorry reflection on lack of industry input.
I think it would be lovely to believe that this was the end we are going to hear about it all, but I see in two years time a lobbist from ASL pushing the government to make it compulsry for every new SPL applicant to sit a Drug Multi Choice Exam, with a 80% pass rate and nominal user pay (rape) recouperation.
