Originally Posted by
Excargodog
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.
That was a long time ago. It was understood that not everybody would finish probation, and there was some luck involved. The idea was to try to make some of your own luck. Things are a lot kinder and gentler today.