Delta Pilot Arrested For Lying To FAA
 

Delta should be ashamed for... what? They should have taken action before the guy lied IYO? The system worked here, and you think it's a shameful incident?

The draconian over-stigmatization of mental illness is what drives people to lie about this stuff, BTW.

For all we know his mental illness was a fear of clowns.

The article (which should've been quoted by the OP as per FT rules) states depression.

Agreed, the whole thing is a lose-lose for pilots. In this case the pilot was a bit of an idiot - simultaneously taking VA payments for the mental health disorder while lying and saying that he does not have a record of mental health disorders. The government is pretty bad at cross-department database lookups (c.f. 9/11) but this one was easy to catch.

Other than that.. if you were a pilot, would you be honest about private mental health issues? When it could mean that your career is temporarily or even permanently derailed? It's easy to be a keyboard jockey hero and say yes, you would, but it's awfully easy to say that when your livelihood is not on the line.

I honestly believe the "four eyes" policy the US already had (and was implemented by the EU post-GermanWings incident) is sufficient to reduce the risk of suicide pilots to an acceptable level without creating this sort of situation for pilots. Most people have enough trouble committing suicide on the ground alone - it's harder to do it in the air, and even harder with the guilt of someone watching and asking what the heck you're doing.

Pilots have extremely generous loss of license and disability insurance for precisely this reason. The system is designed to encourage reporting of all issues, be it headaches, alcoholism, mental health, or otherwise. It's actually significantly more prone to abuse (I have a headache and can't fly... here take 6 months off paid leave to recover) than it is to under-reporting. And that is exactly the type of behavior that should be encouraged--nobody wants a pilot flying when they aren't at their best, so marginal cases of illness should be encouraged to be reported, and compensation continued so that the pilot can recover.

BTW - this EU policy was rolled back 2 years after the GermanWings crash, at least for German airlines. Not sure if it is EU wide.

Sources:
https://onemileatatime.com/two-perso...ule-abolished/
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-scraps...ule/a-38632650

Ultimately the FAA policy on mental health is stupid and outdated. They're basically asking for pilots to keep mental health issues under wraps, to let them metastasize untreated, in order to keep their jobs. Also pretty dumb given the role anxiety plays in mental health: "hey you better not go to someone with mental health issues, or it'll be your job..." thus adding additional stress and exacerbating underlying issues. Pilots should be allowed to seek help without fear of losing their careers over it.

If given the choice between lying and losing your job career, we all know what choice basically everyone but a rounding error's worth of people would take. And that's exactly what the FAA is doing to pilots with mental health concerns. Including stuff even as trivial as ADHD. And they know it. A policy change is long overdue.

No clue why DL should be "ashamed" or what at all OP is trying to imply. "Depression" doesn't make someone slam a planeload of people into a mountain. OP and the FAA are both apparently unwilling to understand the complexities and commonness of mental health issues in society.