Originally Posted by
rickair7777
When I started in the industry, I would have been very scared to call in sick more than maybe twice on probation. Things have changed for the better, but it does sound like you pushed the grey area just a bit, and unfortunately they needed to make an example that month.
You know, that's just plain scary. I mean, I know that as a group regional pilots are young and healthy, but damn.., if any of you have kids in preschool or kindergarten, they bring home all sorts of crud. And how hard is it to break an ankle - just jogging on uneven ground even.
I think it is perfectly acceptable for the airlines to do what the military did, have you bring a clearance form (1042 in the USAF) anytime you see the flight doc with his/her opinion of whether you ought to be flying or not, but so damn much of getting sick is absolutely not within the span of control of the person getting sick that a policy like you described seems like simply punishing someone (and throwing away the effort made to train them) for nothing more than statistically bad luck.
You might as well have a hundred pilots flip a coin five times and fire everyone that gets heads all five times. That will give you about three percent sacrificial goats.