A couple of months ago I wrote a blog regarding pilots and mental illness. If you can remember, I discussed the 2015 crash of Germanwings Flight 4U9525, and the extremely unfortunate example of the pilot, First Officer Andreas Lubitz, of whom suffered from a mental illness, which subsequently led to his deliberate crashing of Flight 4U9525 into the French Alps, killing all 150 on board (Hammer, 2016). That entire situation could have been avoided if the necessary steps were taken to not only get FO Lubitz the appropriate help he needed, but to also properly report his mental health decline by his family doctor and psychiatrist. For this post, I would like to revisit the mental illness topic, but I would like to switch gears and present a few questions regarding military pilots to include: why is military pilot depression and mental illness far less documented or known compared to the general public? Are their screening processes less stringent? Do more of them simpl
Our current Air Traffic Control system, run by the Federal Aviation Administration and funded by Congress, has an airspace comprised of 21 zones divided into individual sectors. These divisions include Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC), Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC), the Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON), Air Traffic Control Towers (ATCT), and Flight Service Stations (FSS) (Freudenrich, 2018). President Trump wants to hand over this infrastructure to a private, nonprofit entity with its own board made up of federal officials, unions, airlines, and airports. The intent is for the FAA to oversee the private entity, which would be funded by user fees such as takeoff and landing charges, as opposed to the preexisting taxes on passenger tickets and fuel (Marshall, 2017). Regardless of what happens, the Air Traffic Control system is in need of an upgrade. This upgrade comes in the form of what we call the NextGen system. Ne