[instaheat]

I've been looking into getting my pilot's license and taking a serious look at the training required for quite some time. Talking with other pilots and students, asking a lot of questions.

They are starting to reduce some of the strict requirements and encumbrances placed on Pilots such as this because of the shortages.

I'm in the unfortunate position of having a DWI from 2009 and have been told by multiple people in the industry that would hinder my career prospects as a pilot. Essentially, I've got no shot at getting hired by American or any other major airline because of something stupid I did when I was in college 14 years ago.

I don't have a drinking problem and am a completely different person. It sucks.

[askonomm]

I never understood why in some countries the system never forgets - it's like they want to punish you till death, even after you already served your sentence.

In Estonia, no matter how horrific the crime, your record gets wiped after 7 years since you finished serving the sentence (got out of prison / probation ended / paid a fine), allowing for people to move on with their lives.

[Gustomaximus]

I like the idea of this but wonder if a better system would be record gets wiped after 7 clear years.

So if someone is committing crimes every 3 or 4 years, the previous records show to reflect ongoing behaviour type, but if you have 7 'clear' years then all is wiped.

[stavros]

It's 7 years after the punishment ends, which, yeah, if it's been 10-15 years since you've committed a crime, it's unlikely you've somehow been biding your time, waiting to commit the next one.

[preisschild]

I think thats how Steam does it :)

After 7 years of no more VAC/game bans the previous ones disappear.

[UberMouse]

Nope. I still have my one and only VAC ban on my profile from 4995 days ago, it's not going anywhere :)

Though possibly Valve handles it differently for first party games, this was for Modern Warfare 2.

[Vilian]

lmao, steam having a better criminal system than US is something that i wasn't expecting ho hear today

[kridsdale1]

gaben for President!

[poizan42]

Here in Denmark criminal records becomes inaccessible to non-government actors 2-5 years after sentence served, depending on the severity of the crime, and 10 years for the government/public sector. In theory it's never wiped and keeps being accessible to the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, so it may still affect your ability to get a security clearance.

There is the caveat though that names are allowed to be published in some cases of more severe crime, so in cases like murder an employer might still be able to find out about it with a google search.

[gosub100]

Because it would damage the reputation of the airline if, in a future incident, the media reports that "and record show he had a previous arrest for DWI". The media would spin it to look like the airline took the risk. I'm not defending that take, just explaining it.

[kccqzy]

The key point is to expunge these old criminal records so no one could find them. Not the media, not a future employer.

[instaheat]

Right. Expunged to the point where you could say "No I have never-" on a government form without that being considered a lie.

I looked into getting my record cleaned up/sealed with my attorney and it all just sounded very... expensive.

[cjbprime]

Not possible for any crime that is reported on by media, surely.

[askonomm]

If its online newspapers then in EU we have the "right to be forgotten" which helps with those articles to be removed from search engines.

[ffgjgf1]

> which helps

Especially if you’re a corrupt politician, child abuser etc. it’s really helpful for that sort of people. Not so much for everyone else, but why would that ever be an issue?

[bluGill]

If the law is written correct you sue any orinization that digs it up for libel. When those are won they will stop.

[ffgjgf1]

So newspapers will be afraid to report on things like that even when it clearly is in the in interest of the society for them to do that?

Criminal records don’t exist just to punish people and penalize them for the rest of their lives but also to inform other what those people are capable of. Expungement should only be possible for non-serious crimes and/or on a case by case basis

[alvah]

The internet never forgets though. You'd have quite a job deleting all the old reports in the media.

[askonomm]

I mentioned in another comment here, but if you are in EU, the "right to be forgotten" makes it quite easy to remove results you do not like about yourself from search engines. Google for example provides a simple form to fill out, and from what i recall in about a month or so those links are gone from results.

[phanimahesh]

Understandable, but this is precisely why teenage antics should not leave permanent records for anyone to exploit.

[cinntaile]

There is too much tolerance for dui/dwi in the world. Repeat offences should result in a permanent loss of the driver's license.

[askonomm]

Sure, permanent loss of drivers license, fine. Does it need to also permanently prevent persons career opportunities though? That's the question here.

[unethical_ban]

Right, and the point is to shape a society where the plebian morons don't have influence on anything of importance, voting being the notable exception.

I know you're not defending the point. I'm just saying.

[gosub100]

its an un-solvable problem. the media (going from well before the internet) profits off of outrage.

[refurb]

Even the courts? If someone is convicted of murder, serves their sentence then 8 years later they do it again, do the courts know of the previous crime?

[askonomm]

Yes, the courts will know (and possibly also police, I'm not sure). However anyone else will get back a criminal record report that's empty. Like if you need to provide a criminal record for visa purposes, or when an employer requests one, or if a bank wants to decide whether or not to give you mortgage. So it's not that your status as a human being in the eyes of the law are reset, it's that for the purposes of opportunities given to you, you are equal to everyone else.

[ffgjgf1]

What about child abusers? People convicted of fraud or other types of corruption? etc. Basically people that never should never be allowed to do certain types of work because it wouldn’t be in the public interest?

[askonomm]

I'm not sure, actually. The law doesn't seem to specify, although it does say exceptions can be made, so I figure that's what happens. Estonia has also been known to deport its own citizens when they truly are a menace to our society.

[workfromspace]

> Estonia has also been known to deport its own citizens when they truly are a menace to our society.

Deport where? Could you please provide us more info?

[refurb]

Seems pretty reasonable!

[Erratic6576]

I will never forget that scene in los Soprano in which, after a car crash, a character asks another one to just kill him before having to deal with the consequences of his DWI

[westmeal]

That's not exactly what happened, he wanted him to get a cab.

[globular-toast]

Or perhaps it's not about punishment but about protecting the public from potentially irresponsible people. Driving and piloting a plane should be considered privileges that come after training and demonstration of ability and understanding of responsibility. These aren't things that should be rights and considered a punishment to take away.

[P_I_Staker]

While possibly still not true, in many places these are actually special crimes that can be never forgotten (driving crimes)... not even true for sex offenses, of the lowest levels.

[FpUser]

Suddenly I love Estonia. In North America punishment lasts until on dies.

[Arnt]

We have this in Norway as well. The chief of police explained it when someone wanted to change it: "We have a tradition here that the court sentences you, and that's it. When you're done with the court's sentence, you've paid your dues to society." It's a good thing.

And that's also why the newspapers will generally write that "a 27-year old from X" did this and that instead of using a full name. People widely known for a crime by their full name can apply to change their name at some point.

[Gibbon1]

In California juvenile criminal records get wiped when the person turns 18. You can also petition to get your record expunged. Can be done but not automatic. Easier for minor douchey crimes and unlikely to impossible to serious ones.

[btilly]

It could be worse.

An estimated 1/4 of all registered sex offenders were minors at the time that they became offenders. The single year of your life when you're most likely to become one is 14.

There are a lot of horror stories like a guy whose 13 year old girlfriend send him a nude photo, her parents found out and reported it, and now he can't live within a certain distance of an elementary school for the rest of his life.

Yeah, if a 24 year old man has pictures of a 13 year old, that's a problem. But a 14 year old boy having pictures of a 13 year old girl?

As a society, we really don't believe in forgiveness.

[ffgjgf1]

The issue here is not the registered offenders list but that things like this are considered crimes and somebody could be convicted for them.

It’s not about forgiveness, it’s about minimizing future harm. If you are an actual (and there should be a sufficiently high bar for that) convicted child abuser you should never be allowed to be employed in any job which allows you to have authority over children etc. in such cases “forgiveness” would certainly be against the public interest.

[btilly]

I don't disagree with you. And I don't disagree with you for the simple reason that, according to all evidence, "pedophile" is not a characteristic that people can change. Any more than "gay" is.

But that's not the way that the law is written.

[smittywerben]

I don't understand how giving a statistic of the average age of juvenile sex offenders supports your point.

[btilly]

The point is that we, as a society, sometimes punish people severely forever. Even when there is no reason to believe that that person is a risk to society.

They aren't in a category called juvenile sex offenders. They are simply registered sex offenders. For the rest of their lives. Randomly punished forever for doing normal stupid kid things.

https://jlc.org/issues/juvenile-sex-offender-registry-sorna estimates this at about 200,000 unlucky people.

[yeowMeng]

Not sure this will be helpful but here goes.

I wanted to be a pilot but am tall (> 6 feet) and poor eye sight (< -10).

I was told at a young age that it would be nearly impossible for me. I accepted my fate for better or worse. Yet you have a better chance than me. Hard to say if it’s worth pursuing.

Nevertheless, I sympathize with you because people can make big mistakes and learn from it but the categorization and stigma remains.

Best of luck to you.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

I’m curious how these aspects are not considered discriminatory - eyesight is commonly fixed by glasses and height is fixed by not squeezing every last dollar out of floorspace - which I would compare to wheelchair accessible buildings (acknowledging the latter is typically more restrictive due to scale).

I’m not trying to go woke here, there are disabilities that prevent performing certain tasks such as flying (total blindness or colour blindness) but there are others which are easily worked around.

[sokoloff]

Corrected vision is not disqualifying for even first class medicals (what’s needed to fly for an airline).

Height or correctable vision can still be disqualifying for military aviators (my vision was disqualifying from flying pointy military jets at the time and might still be).

[genocidicbunny]

In many airplanes, there are legitimate restrictions on how tall you can be as a pilot -- there simply isn't enough room up there for taller pilots to fit.

As for eyesight, I'd imagine it's for the case when the pilot loses/breaks/forgets their glasses. You don't want a pilot who suddenly can't see in midair.

[everforward]

> In many airplanes, there are legitimate restrictions on how tall you can be as a pilot -- there simply isn't enough room up there for taller pilots to fit.

Right, but they were designed that way. It was likely known at design time that there was a maximum height.

Standard bathroom stalls won't fit wheelchairs, but that doesn't absolve companies from a duty to provide ones that are.

There are obviously different physical constraints here than bathrooms, but I'd be surprised if there was a physical constraint limiting this.

As for the eyesight, this strikes me as the kind of things copilots and backup glasses are for. Require every pilot with glasses to carry a backup pair in their shirt pocket. Or maybe contacts in and a pair of glasses (turbulence may be an issue with glasses).

I'd be curious if they're equally cautious with people who are diabetic or have cardiac risk factors.

[genocidicbunny]

> Right, but they were designed that way. It was likely known at design time that there was a maximum height.

Airplane cockpits aren't built the way they are for shiggles. Pilots need to be able to reach controls, and if you design a cockpit for fitting people over 6ft tall, it might become unergonomic, if not downright dangerous for shorter pilots. There are actual safety issues at play here.

Similar for eyesight -- yes they can carry a backup, until they forget it. The safest thing is to require pilots to have adequate uncorrected vision, though some are loosening that to allow lenses. Do you want to fly on an airplane where there's a nonzero chance the pilot is effectively incapacitated because he forgot his glasses?

> I'd be curious if they're equally cautious with people who are diabetic or have cardiac risk factors.

To different degrees, but yes, they are. Some airlines will require their pilots to get regular medical checkups.

[everforward]

> Airplane cockpits aren't built the way they are for shiggles. Pilots need to be able to reach controls, and if you design a cockpit for fitting people over 6ft tall, it might become unergonomic, if not downright dangerous for shorter pilots. There are actual safety issues at play here.

If they can build a thin metal tube that can safely ascend and descend 30k feet, I'm pretty sure they can build controls that are ergonomic for people outside of a 6" height span. Of all the issues airplane engineers face, I refuse to believe that adjustable controls are the one hill they can't conquer.

> Similar for eyesight -- yes they can carry a backup, until they forget it.

This is how practically every part of the plane is. There are redundant parts, until maintenance forgets about it. Except here there's a redundancy of a redundancy; the copilot can take over if the other pilot forgot their backup glasses and their contacts broke or whatever.

Just put it on the pre-flight checklist. If it's good enough for the mechanical parts, it should be good enough for an already-redundant piece of human equipment.

> Do you want to fly on an airplane where there's a nonzero chance the pilot is effectively incapacitated because he forgot his glasses?

Every flight you get on has a non-zero chance of a pilot being incapacitated. That's why there are two. Heart attacks, sudden onset of a seizure disorder, bad medication interactions, etc, etc. There are dozens of reasons why a pilot could be incapacitated mid-air.

If my options are a pilot with glasses or a pilot with high blood pressure, I'm taking the glasses. An effectively blind pilot doesn't cause a distraction, and could be helpful to their copilot (doing radio comms, talking to passengers, maybe watching a gauge or two if they squint). A pilot in cardiac arrest is both incapable of helping and distracting.

I wouldn't worry that much about a pilot with glasses. The glasses are unlikely to spontaneously break, if they do they should have backups, if they don't have backups then the copilot takes over like anything else that incapacitates a pilot. Hell, if it really came down to the wire, there's probably a decent chance that one of the passengers on the plane has a prescription close enough to make a shoddy landing.

[jacinda]

I don't know about Type II but Type I can be extremely limiting. A friend's spouse was diagnosed somewhere between 9 and 12 and it completely ended their dream of becoming a military aviator (also hoped to be an astronaut).

They now work at NASA but have had to fight tooth and nail to go on longer expeditions related to search and rescue and it's really only the advent of CGM that have made it possible, to be honest.

Found this as well after a quick Google search; the first medical approval of someone with Type 1 Diabetes by the FAA was 2020: https://beyondtype1.org/commercial-pilot-diabetes/

[lolc]

Thanks for the link, that was an interesting read. As a T1 I'd say this disease should bar you from a license to fly passengers. An emergency situation in the air can go on for hours, and you don't want diabetes creating extra issues. The pilot has an additional "aviate navigate communicate" thread running but for their diabetes.

On the other hand, I do tell people that a well managed diabetes still lets you do most anything, so I'll reflect on the commercial flying where I think one shouldn't.

[ffgjgf1]

> As for the eyesight, this strikes me as the kind of things copilots and backup glasses are for.

Why take any unnecessary risks at all? If you can’t have your eyesight repaired surgical well… tough luck there are many other careers you can pursue.

> they're equally cautious with people who are diabetic or have cardiac risk factors

Yes of course they are. Which again seems perfectly reasonable

[lolinder]

> there simply isn't enough room up there for taller pilots to fit.

Under the ADA "there simply isn't a wheelchair ramp up to our building" isn't a legitimate restriction on hiring someone who uses a wheelchair—you put a wheelchair ramp in.

OP's point is that arguably the same should apply to other traits like height. The space constraints are somewhat arbitrary and could be remedied.

[genocidicbunny]

That's not correct. The ADA requires reasonable accommodation, not accommodation at all costs. So yes, "there simply isn't a wheelchair ramp up to our building" is not legitimate, but "there simply isn't a wheelchair ramp up to our building and it would be prohibitively expensive or impossible to change that" does work.

[Dylan16807]

But if you keep getting new buildings made for you where it would be straightforward to build in but prohibitively expensive after the fact...

[Dylan16807]

That's not a legitimate reason for airlines. They keep ordering cockpits without an extra couple inches on purpose.

And there's a ton of ways a pilot can become incapacitated. Having an extra pair of glasses is one of the easiest mitigations around, if the odds are actually that bad.

[kortilla]

They don’t order cockpits. That’s not how the industry works.

It’s also not about “enough space” in the entire cockpit, it’s about the layouts of all of the controls and being able to reach them.

“Extra pair of glasses” is not a solution in severe turbulence where the plane drops 100ft in 1 second.

[Dylan16807]

Planes can be customized, and the baseline design is based on what the majority of airlines want.

It's the fault of airlines. Nitpicking is fine if you want to add more details but doesn't change that.

And taller people on average can reach more controls, not less.

For glasses, how often does that make them come off compared to any other random reason for incapacitation? And what if there's a strap trying to keep them on? Acting like this is the only risk factor in isolation is bad.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Just because it was built that way doesn’t mean it’s not discriminatory. An aircraft being half a foot larger wouldn’t have been a big deal if they were built to accomodate tall people in the first place. 6’2 is not an uncommon height.

[schmidp]

I am 6’4 and I am baffled by that argument. Not being “discriminatory” against pilot height is not the most important design choice in an airplane. What about a 7 feet tall person? Would it also be “discriminatory” if they can’t be a pilot?

[Dylan16807]

How difficult is an extra foot? People only get so tall.

But there is a pretty big difference between accommodating 93 percentile for men and 99.96 percentile, and that's only 5 inches in height between 6'1" and 6'6".

[genocidicbunny]

Half a foot larger in what way? Length won't help much. Height? Then you're adding _a lot_ of additional weight because you have to increase the radius of the fuselage.

[Dylan16807]

Big commercial planes do not have their radius defined by the seats and controls in the cockpit. It would not need to increase.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Or you shift the cockpit back

[a_gnostic]

The Army will still let you fly helicopters if you're too tall for the Airforce.

[fragmede]

eyesight for pilots is commonly fixed with Lasik.

[instaheat]

I feel bad for you. I'm sorry to hear that. I appreciate your comment. I do have excellent eye sight and am of average height.

I've wondered if flying private would be any different. I don't "NEED" to work for AA.

[optymizer]

Interesting. Anecdotally, I think I saw plenty of 6ft captains on my way out of the airplane.

[cjbprime]

For what it's worth, I'm only an enthusiast but would be surprised to hear either of those are significant issues, unless you're saying that your corrected eyesight is also poor.

[pageandrew]

Not an airline pilot / medical examiner, but I do read r/flying quite regularly.

Your story is not uncommon. The general wisdom on DWIs is that yes it does hurt your chances of getting into airlines, but if it was (1) minor/borderline, (2) a long time ago, and (3) you have shown a pattern of recovery, it is not a career ender.

[instaheat]

I am still going to go through the motions and earn my hours, criminal history be damned. I was under .15 at the time, which as I understand it, helps me significantly.

Also looking at helicopter/flight medic but for now I am starting back to school in January to finish my AAS in Cybersecurity followed by BS in CS.

[ShadowBanThis01]

You've "been told?" Don't take it as gospel. Move forward and get your license. At the very least, you'll be able to take satisfaction in having achieved something most people haven't.

[instaheat]

Great take. I certainly intend on continuing.

[ShadowBanThis01]

Excellent. Good luck!

[cmurf]

https://www.faa.gov/ame_guide/media/DUIDWI_Alcohol_Incidents...

You can call AMAS (Aviation Medicine Advisory Service) for an opinion.

But ultimately you'll discuss your situation with an AME when applying for a medical certificate, including whether you're best off with 3rd class now and 1st class later. Or just aiming for 1st class right away.

[sokoloff]

It’s hard to say what the policies of the majors will be 5 years from now when you’re ready, but Delta’s current policy is “no DUI in the past 10 years”.

I think the structure of the pilot market is such that tightening of voluntary restrictions is unlikely.

[instaheat]

That's promising, thank you.