Looking through my files just now I saw a welcome note thatDr. Arthur Pape MBBS (CPL(A) MECIR) wrote for welcoming visitors to the CVDPA website.
I dont think we used it in the website so I am pasting it here.
QUOTE
I would like to personally welcome you all as subscribers to the CVDPA. By subscribing, you have made a commitment to ensuring that the CVDPA achieves the articles in its mission statement.
As a subscriber, you are at the business end of the CVDPA. You can expect to be kept informed and you should expect to be asked to contribute to the growth and effectiveness of it.
The task ahead of us is huge, and the bureaucracies and professional groups who promote and protect the Aviation Colour Perception Standard (ACPS) are powerful and fully funded by taxation revenue. Their arguments may be weak, but their funding is huge. Therein lies our greatest dilemma.
We have had great successes in Australia, as is more than fully explained in the website articles, but we should never be complacent. There are many promoters and protectors of the ACPS even in the Australian CASA who would dearly love to see the AAT outcomes reversed. Despite those successes, the job is incomplete and will stay so until the control tower signal gun test is thrown out. The history of how this test has come about in Australia can be talked about at another time. The challenge to it will rely on the fact that the control tower signal gun has no relevance to modern aviation practice and the testing of CVD pilots cannot be masqueraded as anything other than just another colour vision test.
Three highly experienced pilots, each with thousands of hours of unblemished flying records and each with exemplary reports from their superiors and peers have taken on the challenge of fighting an appeal to have the control tower signal gun test thrown out. They have already spent tens of thousands of dollars and expect to pay at least another $100,000 by the time the process is concluded.
A dedicated group of New Zealand pilots is preparing a legal challenge to the NZ CAAs version of the ACPS. They are growing in support and stature. We need to give them as much as we can.
In the USA, CVD pilots face the prospects of being collectively punished by the FAA on the strength of recommendations made to it by the NTSB in the aftermath of the Fedex Flight 1478 crash in Tallahassee in 2002. We have sufficient evidence to put a strong case that it was the PAPI itself that failed to perform. Details of that will be discussed in future postings on the website. Further, whilst the USA was for decades the Mecca for CVD pilots, the ACPS there is no more rational than anywhere else. There is a great deal of work needs doing for CVD pilots in the USA.
Dont even talk about Europe! Whats going on there is totally insane. The CVD pilot there is treated worse than a leper, figuratively speaking.
Yes, the task ahead is daunting. But is it impossible? I think not.
We have shown in Australia that the ACPS is vulnerable. It is based on bad logic and bad science. The CVDPA philosophy is the same no matter what country you look at. There may be wide variation in implementation, but the thesis behind it is universal, and that thesis is weak. The theoretical basis of a challenge to the ACPS is mature and ready to withstand any scrutiny in any country. What we lack is financial muscle. To fight the fight takes a lot of money. We need thousands of people to subscribe. We need many sponsors and benefactors. How can all this happen?
I estimate that in Australia there are about 800,000 CVD people. In the UK its in the order of a couple of million. The same and more for the USA. Add to that the many millions when all the continents are included. Lets just assume that perhaps 0.1 percent of those millions have any wish to be a pilot. Really, I have no idea, but I do know there is a huge potential target out there that just might want to challenge the ACPS. With just a small contribution from each one of those millions, we could have an amazing financial capacity to make the world take us seriously, and by that I mean fight legal challenges.
The first challenge I put to each subscriber is to become pro-active in promoting the CVDPA and telling as many pilots, flying schools, airlines, pilot unions, friends, mothers and fathers and whoever else you think might just be able to help. In our first three days we have had hundreds of hits on the web, we have raised nearly four thousand dollars in cash, and I am certainly happy about the initial response. Now lets all make sure that we build the momentum. We must do this or we will become just another bunch of tyre kickers, moaners, whoa-is-me victims.
I cant express how happy I am to get to this point in the struggle I started in 1977, when I asked the Department of Aviation examiner of airmen who had just failed me on the Farnsworth Lantern What relevance is all this colour vision stuff anyway?î. His reply has rung in my ears a million times in the 35 years since then: 'I dont really know. I think its BS, and maybe you can do something about it, being a Doctor and all that'
END QUOTE