The Empire Strikes Back! on Colour Defective Pilots

[aroa]

ABC breakfast news

CVD issue got a good airing with Dr Arthur Pape this am.

Very well stated by the good Dr.

Great pity many of the other CAsA buggery acts eg J.Quadrio dont get an airing as well

[004wercras]

Interesting video. Sen Fawcett almost managed to get the "Skull" to go supersonic. One more pointed question would probably have done it. For those of you that haven't seen him go through the sound barrier, it is worth waiting for.

Agreed!!! Watching the Skull blow his foofer valve is one of those little treats that life provides on occasions It is frightening, amusing, and in a perverted sort of way addictive to watch!
There will only ever be 1 screaming skull.

[Bill Smith]

Well after a rather direct complaint to ICC and a rather speedy reply, I might add, CASA has returned my ATPL privileges apologising for the "Imposition". However, I am under no illusion that they will have another crack at me further down the track pending the "New Research".
The PMO must be under a little pressure judging by the way he signed off the letter. Take a look at the way the letter was signed off

The interesting thing it in the second paragraph.

[IMG][/IMG]

[Dora-9]

Watching the Skull blow his foofer valve is one of those little treats that life provides on occasions It is frightening, amusing, and in a perverted sort of way addictive to watch!
There will only ever be 1 screaming skull.

Aggreed 004!

In my time in Cathay I never saw a Skull eruption, but I sure as hell heard one!

With the introduction of the B777-300, the HK CAD took fright at the length of the thing and decreed that all converting B777-200 captains must undergo type-specific taxying training. They wanted the yoke painted bright red too, to remind you that you were in a -300 (in case you missed the u/c cameras etc). My "training", along with 5 others, took place early one morning, comprising a clockwise loop of Kai Tak's tarmac, and anti-clockwise loop follwed by a 180 degree turn on the end of the runway, all timed before the aerodrome opened at 0600. It was conducted by Skull - in my 6 years in Cathay I'd never laid eyes on the man, although I'd heard of him (who hadn't?) and I have to say that I was mightily impressed. It could so easily have degenerated into a Monty Python farce; he was calm, cool and very professional.

The eruption, when it came, was after we'd shut down at the end of the session. I was busy exploring the -300's cabin, standing in the rear galley (about as far from the flight deck as you can get) when I was overwhelmed by an avalanche of noise - an awful deafening screaming tirade, never to be forgotten. It was everything 004 described, and more. Apparently some hapless engineer had just come into the cockpit to inform Skull that the mainwheel tyres had been badly scrubbed (all those sharp turns).

Subsequently I had a few more dealings with the man; he was always calm and professional (but then I never had occasion to disaggree with him). He also struck me as being very, very intellegent - it would be sheer folly to underestimate him...

[Kharon]

Bill old son; I'd read that letter again, have another little think and start building a defence. Forked tongue and snake oil make for an evil combination, but when Voodoo is invoked, the most mundane and conciliatory phrases, take on an evil life of their own. In many ways this latest is scarier than the original in that it sets up a 'show cause', reverse onus submission, based on you 'endangering the safety of navigation'. You will need to prove you are not.

Beware grasshopper – Baron La Croix is hunting...

[brissypilot]

ABC News Breakfast + AIPA Weighs in!

Bill Smith, a very interesting letter. Leaves more questions than answers!

For those who missed it, ABC News Breakfast interviewed Dr Arthur Pape this morning.

Will colour blind pilots be grounded? - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)



AIPA's letter has also been released publicly through the CVDPA and delivers a stinging criticism of the way CASA have handled this entire matter.

AIPA Letter to Minister Truss

Dear Minister Truss,

CASA Handling of Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD) Debate

As you are aware, Australia has one of the most enlightened policy positions in world aviation in regard to permitting pilots to fly in commercial service despite having an identified Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD). Our policy position followed on from the Pape (1987) and Denison (1989) decisions of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) and has been vindicated by many years and thousands of hours of safe flight by pilots with CVD. However, CASA has now embarked on a set of tactics to unwind that position.

Normally, I would express the concerns of the Australian and International Pilots Association (AIPA) directly with the Director of Aviation Safety, Mr John McCormick, before raising the issue with you. However, it is clear to me from watching Senate Estimates that Mr McCormick is determined to press ahead with his strategy to unwind the Australian CVD policy position, regardless of both the empirical safety evidence and the unnecessary damage that will ensue to the livelihoods of a significant number of Australia’s professional aviators.

The letters sent on 05 June 2014 by CASA to affected pilots and their employers, citing unspecified "recent medical research", have been condemned by many industry participants as a blatant form of institutional bullying that not only exacerbates the lack of trust that CASA engenders within the industry, but also underlines the lack of regulatory courage and integrity in the way that CASA is approaching this issue.

In effect, CASA has implied without evidence that the affected pilots and their employers are accepting an unnecessary risk if they continue to operate. Despite years of incident-free operations conducted on the basis of medical certification given by CASA, some operators might now feel compelled to restrict the livelihoods of their employees, simply because CASA may decide that those operators’ risk management or operational judgement is somehow deficient, thus placing their business at risk of some future regulatory action. AIPA is concerned that, should employees’ livelihoods be adversely affected as a consequence of this implied threat, CASA will not be a party to any Fair Work proceedings and will thus escape any judicial scrutiny, despite their lack of courage or justification to act directly against the medical certification already issued.

I appreciate that you would not normally intervene in matters directly affecting safety. However, AIPA does not believe that there is any evidence to suggest a safety issue in Australia’s current CVD policy – in fact, quite the opposite – and that the approach adopted by CASA is a procedural abuse that must be immediately rescinded, with the protagonists sanctioned appropriately.

In many ways, this cynical attempt by the senior executives of CASA to attack the long-standing CVD policy position of Australia, in concert with their intention to use the AAT to wind that policy back, has dulled some of the glimmer of hope that the industry attributed to your Aviation Safety Regulatory Review (ASRR).

As you know, AIPA is necessarily a champion of procedural fairness and judicial review. We are concerned generally about the industry wide view that CASA will not embrace the Government’s Model Litigant policy and that CASA is now using the AAT and the Federal Court processes to financially overwhelm industry applicants seeking independent redress. While AIPA is not in a position to truly assess the validity of that industry view, we do note the lack of positive evidence in the public arena to offset that perspective. The evidence in Senate Estimates of the CASA financial planning for the O’Brien CVD review in the AAT does not help allay any concerns that industry participants may have about the AAT moving further and further beyond the financial reach of many people to seek review of administrative decisions.

Given the path that CASA seems determined to follow in regard to CVD pilots, AIPA strongly recommends that you accept the evidence of many years of safe operations by CVD pilots in Australia that this is not a safety issue and that you consequently intervene to direct a more sensible and less expensive approach to whatever procedural issue that is motivating CASA to further alienate much of the Australian aviation industry.

Yours sincerely,

Nathan Safe
President
Australian & International Pilots Association

The other letters from VIPA and AFAP are also available here:
http://cvdpa.com/news/pilot-union-support

[Sarcs]

Skull blowing foofer valve!

Here is a reasonable caricature of Herr Skull building up a head of steam...



Something I dare say will have happened a number of times over the past week, when anyone dares to utter the letters CVD in the presence of Herr Skull.
Heard a rumour that the DAS (STBR) has gone out on extended stress leave and is currently sitting on some isolated beach resort with a PMO direction of absolutely no access to PEDs or the internet...

Which is probably a good thing after reading brissypilot's post...

[Creampuff]

Extracts from Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them, by David H. Freedman (bolding added):

[C]an any medical-research studies be trusted?

That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies … is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.
…

He first stumbled on the sorts of problems plaguing the field, he explains, as a young physician-researcher in the early 1990s at Harvard. At the time, he was interested in diagnosing rare diseases, for which a lack of case data can leave doctors with little to go on other than intuition and rules of thumb. But he noticed that doctors seemed to proceed in much the same manner even when it came to cancer, heart disease, and other common ailments. Where were the hard data that would back up their treatment decisions? There was plenty of published research, but much of it was remarkably unscientific, based largely on observations of a small number of cases. A new “evidence-based medicine” movement was just starting to gather force, and Ioannidis decided to throw himself into it, working first with prominent researchers at Tufts University and then taking positions at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health. He was unusually well armed: he had been a math prodigy of near-celebrity status in high school in Greece, and had followed his parents, who were both physician-researchers, into medicine. Now he’d have a chance to combine math and medicine by applying rigorous statistical analysis to what seemed a surprisingly sloppy field. “I assumed that everything we physicians did was basically right, but now I was going to help verify it,” he says. “All we’d have to do was systematically review the evidence, trust what it told us, and then everything would be perfect.”

It didn’t turn out that way. In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.

But beyond the headlines, Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research. “Randomized controlled trials,” which compare how one group responds to a treatment against how an identical group fares without the treatment, had long been considered nearly unshakable evidence, but they, too, ended up being wrong some of the time. “I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says. Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.

This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”

Perhaps only a minority of researchers were succumbing to this bias, but their distorted findings were having an outsize effect on published research. To get funding and tenured positions, and often merely to stay afloat, researchers have to get their work published in well-regarded journals, where rejection rates can climb above 90 percent. Not surprisingly, the studies that tend to make the grade are those with eye-catching findings. But while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter. The great majority collapse under the weight of contradictory data when studied rigorously. Imagine, though, that five different research teams test an interesting theory that’s making the rounds, and four of the groups correctly prove the idea false, while the one less cautious group incorrectly “proves” it true through some combination of error, fluke, and clever selection of data. Guess whose findings your doctor ends up reading about in the journal, and you end up hearing about on the evening news? Researchers can sometimes win attention by refuting a prominent finding, which can help to at least raise doubts about results, but in general it is far more rewarding to add a new insight or exciting-sounding twist to existing research than to retest its basic premises—after all, simply re-proving someone else’s results is unlikely to get you published, and attempting to undermine the work of respected colleagues can have ugly professional repercussions.
…

He chose to publish one paper, fittingly, in the online journal PLoS Medicine, which is committed to running any methodologically sound article without regard to how “interesting” the results may be. In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time. Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views. “You can question some of the details of John’s calculations, but it’s hard to argue that the essential ideas aren’t absolutely correct,” says Doug Altman, an Oxford University researcher who directs the Centre for Statistics in Medicine.
…

Most journal editors don’t even claim to protect against the problems that plague these studies. University and government research overseers rarely step in to directly enforce research quality, and when they do, the science community goes ballistic over the outside interference. The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results—except they don’t. Only the most prominent findings are likely to be put to the test, because there’s likely to be publication payoff in firming up the proof, or contradicting it.

But even for medicine’s most influential studies, the evidence sometimes remains surprisingly narrow. Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested. Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades. He looked at three prominent health studies from the 1980s and 1990s that were each later soundly refuted, and discovered that researchers continued to cite the original results as correct more often than as flawed—in one case for at least 12 years after the results were discredited.
…

To say that Ioannidis’s work has been embraced would be an understatement. His PLoS Medicine paper is the most downloaded in the journal’s history, and it’s not even Ioannidis’s most-cited work—that would be a paper he published in Nature Genetics on the problems with gene-link studies. Other researchers are eager to work with him: he has published papers with 1,328 different co-authors at 538 institutions in 43 countries, he says. Last year he received, by his estimate, invitations to speak at 1,000 conferences and institutions around the world, and he was accepting an average of about five invitations a month until a case last year of excessive-travel-induced vertigo led him to cut back. Even so, in the weeks before I visited him he had addressed an AIDS conference in San Francisco, the European Society for Clinical Investigation, Harvard’s School of Public Health, and the medical schools at Stanford and Tufts.
…

We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough. But as long as careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, scientists will keep delivering exactly that.

“Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”

Hmmmm, I wonder why these bits jumped out at me….

“Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them.”

“At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,”

“Not surprisingly, the studies that tend to make the grade are those with eye-catching findings. But while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter. The great majority collapse under the weight of contradictory data when studied rigorously.”

“[R]esearchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science ...”

“[A]ssuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time.”

“Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right.”

QED PMO.

[triton140]

Interesting stuff Creampuff, as one who has worked in the medical research field for over 50 years both at the bench and latterly as a venture capitalist it hardly surprises me unfortunately

One of the failings of science is the unwillingness to let go of a flawed theory despite overwhelming evidence that it is wrong - witness how long it took us to acknowledge that the earth was not the centre of the universe, or in more recent times to accept that ulcers could be cured with cheap antibiotics instead of being "controlled" on a lifetime of expensive meds.

The problem with CVD and CAsA's stance is that there is not one skerrick of evidence in any of the literature to support them! Nothing. To the contrary, the available evidence runs counter to their approach!

CAsA - putting AUTHORITY before safety

[Creampuff]

Hear! Hear! triton140.

Pilot colour vision standards are merely a relic of an historical coincidence.

[YPJT]

I just received this response from my local member of parliament:

Thank you for your email.

I have contacted the Minister for Infrastructure, the Hon. Warren Truss, on your behalf to investigate this issue further.

I will contact you as soon as possible once I receive a response.

Yours sincerely

On its own would probably not achieve much but if enough did it and the minister was bombarded with submissions from various MPs then it just might make him do something.

[halfmanhalfbiscuit]

from the AIPA letter

The letters sent on 05 June 2014 by CASA to affected pilots and their employers, citing unspecified "recent medical research", have been condemned by many industry participants as a blatant form of institutional bullying that not only exacerbates the lack of trust that CASA engenders within the industry, but also underlines the lack of regulatory courage and integrity in the way that CASA is approaching this issue.

How many times is bullying now being mentioned. Sen X was very clear in his appendix to the Senate report. This could be the way to join all the issues together.

[thorn bird]

"it sets up a 'show cause', reverse onus submission"


Bill, Kharon is dead right, that letter is about the most evil, cynical, cheap shot sleight of hand you could get, for goodness sake, what sewer did these people crawl out of? and why does the minister tolerate them?


It should be the biggest flag waving in the face of the minister.


Warren..."CAsA IS CORRUPT OLD MATE"


How much confirmation do you need!!


You may not be in a position to ignore it for much longer!!! and forget about saying you haven't been warned, think of the risks you take of doing nothing..a smoking hole now... and Warren old mate you are screwed...Wanna see how close? there are posts on this sight for you to ponder.
As others have said Tick Tock

[Frank Arouet]

Bill. I would also lend support to Kharons interpretation of that letter. This is exactly the reversal of the burden of proof Senator George Brandis' wants people to highlight. A show cause notice puts that burden on you.


On a separate matter relating to the new DAS, one has to ask if he will also be selected from "the Cathay Club"?

[Creampuff]

I'll be folding money she won't be.

[halfmanhalfbiscuit]

25th Jun 2014, 19:51 #255 (permalink)
Creampuff

Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Salt Lake City Utah
Posts: 2,349
I'll be folding money she won't be.

Would this person just need to add a C to her current dept initials? Perhaps head of ASA and CASA or just a move to CASA?

Need a break from Cathay maybe the next one.

[004wercras]

On a separate matter relating to the new DAS, one has to ask if he will also be selected from "the Cathay Club"?

My money is still on a particular 'QF person' taking the reigns. Time will tell. And if I am correct it will herald the end of the CX era and herald a new QF era at the asylum! Then again, Byron was ex DJ and didn't really populate the place full of fun loving DJ people, so who knows. One thing is for certain - the incoming DAS will be inheriting an incredibly well polished turd, so buyer beware! The new DAS will be inheriting a dysfunctional clusterf#ck of an organisation, an organisation that has alienated itself and pissed off most of industry, an organisation that is filled with bigots, bullies, psychopaths and sociopaths, an organisation that lies and deceives, an organisation that will STILL be entrenched and managed by a long term calculative, manipulative, unaccountable Iron Ring. Aargh yes, good luck to the new DAS

[LeadSled]

004,
I can fit two ex-QF names to that description, both "available", in my opinion, god help Australian aviation, at any level, if either of them wind up with the job.

Personally, they are both "good blokes", I know them well, professionally and personally, but both are , in my opinion, supremely unqualified for the job that has to be done, if anything is going to change at CASA.

As a matter of interest, have a look at the selection criteria, and the ASRR suggested criteria, neither of the two I am thinking of, is within a bull's roar.
Tootle pip!!

[Kharon]

Bored first – DAS second.

The TAAAF web site is worth a visit – anyway, but the very sensible suggestions – HERE – are 'doable' right away. Perhaps we should get in behind this and push. It makes good sense, is factually and corporately correct, would put the brakes on the Shambollic ambitions, give Truss an escape path and allow due process to take it's slow, steady course.

The TAAAF has asked the Minister to immediately reconstitute the CASA Board in accordance with the principles outlined in the report.

It has also asked that the Minister not extend the term of the current CASA Director of Aviation Safety beyond the current extension to August 31.

And it wants the immediate establishment of the Aviation Industry Consultative Council as per Coalition policy.

[triton140]

They make an excellent point - the old Board should have no part whatsoever in the appointment of a new DAS.