The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is relating its new Safety Recommendation Letter on Pilot Flight Proficiency Checks to the ditching of an Air Sunshine Cessna 402 in the Atlantic Ocean in July 2003 (ASW, Oct. 18, 2004). According to the NTSB, the pilot's inability to single-handedly cope with an engine failure and concurrent failure to brief passengers on the impending ditching led to the deaths of two of them. More than 15 years earlier (1983 to 1988) the pilot had completed a bad run where he'd managed to fail a total of nine flight proficiency checks. However, looking even further back (than his 2003 ditching) it is easy to locate other instances that could have given rise to such concerns about an individual's latent failure history. The captain of American Eagle 3379 "spun in" in a serviceable Jetstream 31 on Dec. 13, 1994, killing 15 -- after (unbelievably) wrongly assessing an ignition light as an engine failure. He'd recently come from another operator where his deficient performance as a copilot had led to a quiet termination by mutual agreement. His records should have followed him to the new locale but his new employer failed to follow through and check the referee.

Under the recommended regime, a pilot would have a set number of flight checks that he could fail before having to find a new career. In the meantime, his last five years of failure history would follow him around from job to job, affect his prospects and dog his days. It would appear that the more Privacy Acts there are around, the less your affairs are actually protected. We are continually being reassured that our irrelevant privacy matters are conscientiously withheld from the uncaring Public Domain but, as pilots, our personal and private failures are to be public property in the Dominant and pre-Eminent Domain of our working life. We can't see ALPA, BALPA nor IFALPA members agreeing to that any more than they would to having Allen Funt and Candid Camera record their next accident.