Annual medical chore!

I had my annual JAA / EASA (or whatever it now is) aviation medical the other day. I was also due for my two-yearly FAA examination, but by no coincidence, the AME I use is licenced for both authorities, so I get one medical examination and two certificates, of course he makes an extra administration charge for the paperwork, but that’s fine by me. The examination was the usual non-event, for which I am very pleased and grateful. Due to my age (54 / 55) I also have an annual ECG. We also played the usual ‘running gag’ with my eye test – ‘So, taking your glasses off, tell me what letters you can read on the chart’ – ‘what chart?’ – ‘Yes, very good, heard that one before, now what letters can you read on the chart’ – ‘no, seriously, I can’t see what I would call an eye-test chart, let alone any lettering’ – ‘AH! I see, err, well that’s OK as you can see well enough with glasses’ (so why try to test me without glasses??).

The cost was a total of £175 for both the JAA and FAA certificates. The Doctor was wrestling more with the on-line input that each authority now require and for his trouble and my investment, I got two pretty basic, locally printed certificates.

What I don’t get at all is why each licensing authority (JAA, Transport Canada, FAA etc.) all have their own and quite different medical requirements, validity periods, forms etc. Why the hell can’t there be a single medical standard accepted by all authorities (I gave up ranting about a single licencing authority that would apply worldwide a long time ago – it is so obvious we should simply adopt the FAA approach!)? But then I guess that would involve civil servants working together, and we couldn’t have that could we, hell, what would we do without all this national job creation after all!