[redis_mlc]

I had to break it to a teen with epilepsy whose goal in life was to be a pilot, "The FAA medical will reject you, but maybe you can work in an FBO or other aviation business." (He wasn't interested in flying a desk.)

In aviation, anything related to loss of consciousness (LoC) is automatically disqualifying. You can get a special issuance for most other health problems (cancer, high blood pressure, sometimes diabetes) but they have to be under control. DUIs are also taken very seriously now.

One of the most alarming stories was when a Florida regional jet pilot who drank too much Mountain Dew (caffeine) and had a heart race event, causing him to cancel a flight. FAA medical raked him over the coals with batteries of tests. Don't know if he got his medical back. So don't Red Bull and fly!

Note that FAA medical waivers for corona may not apply to insurance requirements:

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2020/march/31/f...

[ycombinete]

This doesn’t surprise me. I’m not epileptic, but one night under strobes at a club I had a full on tonic-clonic seizure. I hadn’t been drinking, or taken any hard drugs, but I had been consuming a lot of caffeine syrups to study at university that week.

Caffeine is a hell of a drug!

[redis_mlc]

I haven't heard of caffeine triggering epilepsy, but yup, here's a link:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29414557/

Good to know. It wasn't reported that the Florida pilot had a seizure, but he too was too jacked up to concentrate on flying. Had it been a seizure, it would be tough get an aviation medical renewed because it can't be proved that LoC won't happen again.

Fatigue Countermeasures in Aviation (Mountain Dew Highest Caffeine Content)

https://www.asma.org/asma/media/asma/pdf-policy/2009/fatigue...

[ycombinete]

So, how I understand it is that our brains have something like a seizing threshold. Which is the amount of stress they can be put under before a seizure is induced. Certain things can lower that threshold. And I think caffeine (or stimulants in general?) and lack of sleep are both things that lower it.

So it was the loud music and bright strobe light that triggered the seizure. The caffeine and the lack of sleep lowered my brains resistance to seizing.

[ryandrake]

Another thing that's becoming more and more an issue as more young people get diagnosed, is that the FAA considers ADHD and other attention-deficit conditions to be disqualifying as well. If you're taking medication for ADHD or similar conditions and want to be a pilot, you're dead in the water until you get off them and can show that you don't have some kind of attention difficulty.

[quercusa]

The military treats ADHD the same way and won't take anyone who's used meds for it in the past year. That's the official line, anyway.

In reality, recruiters tell candidates to lie about the meds ("everybody does it") and to stay off them long enough to pass the urine test.

[curryst]

That's interesting. I wonder if that makes people with ADHD ineligible for the draft? I wouldn't be mad about that. I'm also kind of curious about their reasoning. Is it fear that they won't be able to keep a steady supply of medication all the time (i.e. delivering Adderal to the front lines might not be easy), and that people with ADHD become a liability without it? Amphetamines seemed fairly successful for the Nazis during the invasion of France, although the rate that they gave them out at ended in massive addiction. The optics on doing something similar to Nazis is pretty bad, though.

[quercusa]

That seems to be the story, but the second half of the game, as per the recruiter, is that once in, you can go to the military doctor and 'realize' that you seem to have a bit of ADHD to get a prescription for the very same meds: "I think Concerta XR 27mg might be what I need".

[redis_mlc]

1) If you're normal-weighted and can do the pushups, the recruiter will do a lot of effort on your behalf.

2) Because military recruiters are under tremendous pressure to get enlistments. They can be court-martialled if they miss quota.

[quercusa]

My son was very turned off by being told "It's OK to lie about this to get in; everybody knows it's how the game is played."

[taneq]

Oof, this hits close to home. I was working towards being a fighter pilot until I was told by a recruiter in no uncertain terms that having a visual impediment disqualified me irrevocably. I've moved on to other aspirations but damned if I'm not a little bitter around military aerospace hardware.

[taneq]

(In reply to the dead response, the recruiter never mentioned it but I found out many years later that the navy does indeed have pilots and they aren't as picky about eyesight. By that time it was way too late and I was down another career path. At the time I just trusted the recruiter since you'd hope they knew what they were doing.)

[redis_mlc]

The three different services have different requirements, and one allows lasik/etc.

Note that if you wash out in the Navy, there's a lot of crappy jobs you can be assigned to.