Originally published at: NTSB Study Shows Increase In Drug Detection Among Fatal Accident Pilots
More than half of pilots tested had at least one drug detected, while potentially impairing drugs were found in 28.6%.
This appears to be an increasingly significant issue, and more often than not it involves legal medications. Giving training, including for certificates/ratings and flight reviews, I find a lot of folks don’t have a good grip on how to determine whether it’s safe to fly with various legal meds. AOPA’s Basic Medical Education Course (free to all pilots regardless of AOPA membership status) discusses these issues (and a whole lot more about self-determination of fitness to fly) in depth – a very good investment of an hour or less. For information about the specific medications, including whether flying is allowed while taking and if not, how long to wait before flying) see AOPA’s Medication Database and the FAA Do Not Fly/Do Not Issue list.
Be careful in drawing conclusions from statistics. The statistics mentioned here do not specify the concentration of the drugs detected. For example, it is OK to fly with a detectible amount of alcohol in your blood as long as the concentration is low enough. The same is true for many prescription drugs that only become “illegal” above a certain concentration. There are of course certain drugs that are prohibited at any concentration.
This looks to me like the report was written by someone with an other-than-safety agenda. If the focus was on safety, the report would be about the percentages with levels of potentially impairing drugs at levels likely to lead to material impairment. But I’m guessing that wouldn’t give scare-headline results that would support that other-than-safety agenda. Someone’s budget, would be my first guess.
I find it insulting and misleading that the first pie chart shown on page 10 of the report shows the percentage of pilot types involved but then lumps in sport pilots AND people with no pilots license at all in the same group. Why break out all other pilot types except for sport pilots!?!? If you scroll on down to page 17, you’ll see that people with no pilots license at all accounts for 21 of the 45 fatal incidents in the “Sport Pilot/None/Other” group shown in the graph on page 10! Why not break out the sport pilot group like all the other pilot groups and show that we (I am a sport pilot) have the lowest percentage of accidents of any pilot group?
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