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June 20 2014

RE: UNILATERAL DETRIMENTAL ACTION BY CASA AGAINST SELECTED PILOT GROUP.

My name is XXXX. I am a professional pilot of 40 plus years standing and 17,000 accident free flying hours; bar one successfully mitigated helicopter engine failure in 1979. Flying has always been my passion and my life. I currently work in an overseas environment although I always maintain my Australian licences.

In 1970 when I took my first aviation medical it was quite a shock to be classified as colour vision abnormal as there had been no previous indication of any detrimental effect on my life thus far. However, this medical assessment had a significant impact on me in many ways for the rest of my life.

Despite a sense of discrimination and imposition thereafter on behalf of the aviation regulator, I, like many other similarly assessed pilots, persisted in the pursuit of a (somewhat limited) rewarding career.

Within that pursuit I have obtained Commercial Pilot Licence (CPL) qualifications in both fixed wing and rotary wing aircraft capacities, as well as Instrument Ratings (IR) for both categories of aircraft. I have also flown both fixed wing and helicopters at night under Night Visual Metrological Conditions (NVMC) rules, (a capability brought about by the successful case of Denison vs CASA in the 1980’s). There has never been an adverse circumstance from this undertaking; i.e. night flying.

I also hold an Australian Airline Transport Pilot Licence Helicopter (ATPLH) which is the licence required for regular public transport but it is endorsed such that I cannot exercise the privileges of that licence. This is a strange imposition because although I am considered safe and capable of flying a helicopter by myself under Visual Meteorological Conditions (VMC) at night I am further considered unsafe to fly at night in a multi crew environment most likely conducted under the Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), a style of flight requiring little or no visual reference to the outside world. So it seems I am safer by myself at night than with another equally competent pilot??

Recently I received what appears to be a generic letter from CASA which seems to infer that Australian operators have been advised that anybody classified as colour vision abnormal under their employ has literally overnight become clearly unsafe and their future operational capacity as a safe pilot should be reassessed. How is this suddenly possible? How can a government body spread such apparently slanderous innuendo?

In my mind this communication appears tantamount to a legally unfair and possibly slanderous besmirchment of many safe pilots and would possibly be the ruination of many successfully proven long standing careers. This is an area beyond my capacity but it does seem that legal or at least administrative or political scrutiny toward CASA is warranted on this matter.

To that end I would like to bring to your attention the activities of the Colour Vision Defective Pilots Association (CVDPA) under the determined stewardship of Doctor Arthur Pape, (although I personally detest the term ‘defective’.) Dr Pape has at his disposal a significant amount of records in respect of the issues discussed in this letter.

As CASA is about to unilaterally destroy the careers, livelihoods and lives of many people, ostensibly on an unfounded whim, and without apparent recourse on behalf of the targeted professionals; I implore you to liaise with Dr Pape and the CVDPA in pursuit of this matter. The CVDPA may be reviewed at their website Colour Vision Defective Pilots Association (CVDPA). Dr Pape may be contacted directly at [email protected]

In appreciation of your positive response,

Captain XXXX

ATPLH, CPLA, B. Aviation; Certified Aviation Safety Auditor.

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Mr McCormick : I will ask the manager of the legal branch to give you that figure, Senator.

Mr Rule : There will obviously be a number of specialist witnesses called to give evidence.

Senator FAWCETT: Two? Ten? Fifteen?

Mr Rule : I am not across the precise number that would be—

Senator FAWCETT: Would I be wrong if I said 12?

Mr Rule : I could not say that that number is wrong. We are out of the ballpark, but I cannot give a confirmed number at this stage. The exchange of evidence between the parties only just finished at the end of last week, I believe, so there will be some to-ing and fro-ing as to which evidence and which witnesses are required. I can certainly take that on notice and provide a more settled estimate of that for you, if that would assist.

Senator FAWCETT: That would be good, but you must also have metrics from previous inquiries. Knowing what expert witnesses charge for their appearances, the travel and accommodation costs, the whole cost of conducting the inquiry in terms of transcript fees et cetera, have you made a provision in your budgeting for how much you anticipate this AAT case will cost?

Mr Rule : Obviously, we do do forward estimates of how much we think a case is likely to cost. Generally we do it across quarterly budget considerations, so total cost can get washed out as you conduct these cases piecemeal.

Senator FAWCETT: I am happy to add the figures up, Mr Rule, if you could give me the figures across those quarterly milestones.

Mr Rule : We can certainly take that on notice and provide those figures.

Senator FAWCETT: But would it be a reasonable expectation that it would be at least another $43,500 on top of what you have already spent, if not significantly more?

Mr Rule : It would not be out of the realms of possibility to accumulate another $40,000 in costs, no.

Senator FAWCETT: A very understated remark, Mr Rule, but thank you. Could I ask Mr McCormick or Mr Rule: in terms of whether or not you move ahead with this, my understanding is that you have an obligation, like any other Commonwealth department, to be a model litigant. As I look at this, there are about eight criteria to being a model litigant, and I see CASA is not performing particularly well on about five of them. Can I ask what the response has been to Mr O'Brien's request to reach a settlement before the hearing?

Mr Rule : A mediation was conducted in the early part of last year, which was ultimately unsuccessful. I was not aware of any other proposal to—

Senator FAWCETT: A letter from his lawyers written in, I think, February this year?

Mr Rule : I was not aware of the specific details of that proposal.

Senator FAWCETT: So you are planning to spend probably more than $100,000 and you are not aware of an opportunity to reach a settlement before the AAT hearing.

Mr Rule : I think that at different points along the way Mr O'Brien has suggested that he would be prepared to resolve the matter, but always on the basis that he have access to the privileges of his airline transport pilot licence. That, of course, has been the major sticking point from CASA's perspective, and the reason why those negotiations have not been successful.

Mr McCormick : I think we only have the legal costs as a total legal cost, but if you wish to give us on notice the specific areas in which you think we are not being a model litigant, then we will look at exactly what we have said in the past. As Mr Rule has said, my understanding is that up until now, there has not been any indication that Mr O'Brien wishes to retreat from the position of holding an ATP—

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More recent guidelines stress the use of low contrast gray backgrounds and limited use of color.

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The Australian & International Pilots Association has written directly to Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development Warren Truss over CASA’s handling of the Debate over colour vision deficiency CVD affected pilots.

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Scrubba # 111 –"The outrage is predominantly being committed against commercial pilots and I suspect that this forum is not the first port of call for those pilots. Importantly, I also suspect that the legion of non-pilots that use PPRuNe as something of a barometer for aviation politics in Australia would not come here as a first or only window either. (my bold)."

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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.

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

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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

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[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.
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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.”

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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

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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