Reforming Special Issuance Process Will Help Many Pilots

October 8, 2015 - EAA’s top advocacy priority remains passing Pilot’s Bill of Rights 2 (PBOR2), the bill that would allow most third-class medical certificate holders to self-certify their ability to fly for the rest of their careers. In addition, though, virtually everyone in the aviation community agrees that reforming the oftentimes burdensome, expensive, and time-consuming special issuance medical process is a major need.

Toward that end, this week EAA’s Sean Elliott, Vice President of Advocacy and Safety, was joined by EAA's Aeromedical Council members Dr. Jack Hastings and Dr. Stephen Leonard at the formational meeting of a Civil Aviation Medical Association (CAMA)-led aeromedical coalition for the purpose of achieving significant reform to the current FAA special issuance process. The meeting took place at the opening of the annual CAMA Scientific Meeting for its membership in Fort Worth, Texas. Also in attendance were several of the professional pilot associations/unions, a representative from Transport Canada, AOPA, and the Aerospace Medical Association (AsMA).

The current FAA special issuance process is badly bottlenecked and routinely experiences excessive delays in returning airmen to flight status on even the simplest of treatable conditions.  The aviation medical community recognizes the harm this is causing and thus the formation of this new coalition being led by CAMA.

The stated goal of this new coalition is to identify process improvements to the bottlenecked special issuance process and move more of the simplistic treatable disqualifying conditions to the Conditions AME’s can Issue (CACI) list and thus impact the expediency to the current process.