I have a felony conviction question concerning medical certificate

PittsDriver said:
<snip>You're kidding, right? One of the best things about being a pilot is that I got the approval of an AME and the FAA? </snip>
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Actually, I had in mind the whole experience, including instruction, examinations, and even criticisms such as this one of yours.
 
ouch! i sure hope it wont be be that much. i'm going to call arround on monday. thanks for all the advise everyone
 
gbreese said:
ouch! i sure hope it wont be be that much. i'm going to call arround on monday. thanks for all the advise everyone
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With any luck, if it was that long ago and your record is clean since, they may not require it. Prep for the worst, and hope for the best.
 
wsuffa said:
Beyond that, even Canada considers a criminal record to be cause to deny entry. So, even having a misdemeanor can make travel to other countries impossible (or expensive as Canada has a 'rehabilitation' system that costs $$$).
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I have had passengers questioned in Canada. Once they even took someone downtown to their main office and we had to wait around just in case we had to take him back to the US.

Ron Levy said:
The TSA list Bruce quoted above applies only to working for air carriers, not personal flying, and does not directly affect issuance of an FAA pilot certificate.
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That's where I've seen the list before, and for us it only applied after they came out with the Twelve-five rule after 9/11. Besides, the list says 10 years, and the OP's conviction was much longer ago than that. I also got the idea that he was a juvenile at the time.
 
Being 17 was this a juvenile conviction? If so it should not apply and may not have been necessary to list it.
 
The question 18v makes no distiction. The answer in this case is yes.

If you answer no, you can potentially lose both your medical and your operator's certificate (at whatever level you have it).
 
Dean said:
Being 17 was this a juvenile conviction? If so it should not apply and may not have been necessary to list it.
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The OP said these were felonies. He was charged as an adult do to the seriousness of the crime, or a bad lawyer.
 
Welcome to the board.

I have a few observations based on my part-time volunteer work with people who have less-than-perfect backgrounds.

Some of the guys I work with at the mission have criminal records (probably most of them, actually) either in New York or in other states. Once in a while, when one of them cleans up and decides to enroll in a trade school, they find once they've completed the course that their conviction technically disqualifies them getting the city and/or state licenses to actually do the work. These include such things as a motor vehicle inspector's license, welding license, insurance agent's license, and so forth.

New York State has a process for obtaining something called a "Certificate of Relief from Disabilities" that removes all of these bars. Other states have pretty much the same thing, only some of them call it a "Certificate of Good Conduct" or "Certificate of Rehabilitation." They tend to be a lot easier to get than pardons, but they accomplish many of the same purposes. They're official statement from the sentencing jurisdictions that based upon the offender's good behavior, they have made a decision to restore his or her civil rights and remove any bars imposed by virtue of their conviction.

In New York, if an offender is on probation, the sentencing judge can issue a Certificate of Relief, and it's usually a same-day thing if the probation officer signs off on the application. For parolees (or people who have been released from parole recently and can still get in touch with their old parole officers), it's issued by the parole division and takes a couple of weeks once the P.O. signs off on it. For people who have been off parole for a long time, it can take longer (because no one remembers them), but it still usually doesn't take more than a month in my guys' experience.

The TSA, I should mention, doesn't give a flying flip about Certificates of Relief, as least as referencing HAZMAT endorsements on Commercial Driver's Licenses. They want a pardon or an expungement. I assume (without any real evidence, by the way) that the same would be true for a pilot certificate. But if the conviction is more than 10 years old, it's a moot question anyway.

Also, it seems that most government agencies can use their own discretion to waive a conviction and issue paper if they believe the conviction to be old enough or irrelevant enough, or the applicant rehabilitated enough, even without any sort of pardon or other paperwork.

I don't know if this applies to an FAA medical, but it seems to me that your AME was implying that possibly he could approve it in-office given all the information he requested. I'd ask for a clarification on that before spending $$$$ on shrinks. I'd ask first and use those $$$$ for flying instead if the AME can issue without the tests. I have no idea if he can, but he seemed to be implying he might be able to.

Good luck!

-Rich
"Kids, this-piece-of-paper's-got-47-words-37-sentences-58-words-we-wanna-know-details-of-the-crime-time-of-the-crime-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say-pertaining-to-and-about-the-crime-I-want-to-know-arresting-officer's-name-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say", and talked for forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that he said, but we had fun filling out the forms and playing with the pencils on the bench there, and I filled out the massacre with the four part harmony, and wrote it down there, just like it was, and everything was fine and I put down the pencil, and I turned over the piece of paper, and there, there on the other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read the following words:

("KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?")

I went over to the sergeant, said, "Sergeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug." He looked at me and
said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send you fingerprints off to Washington."

And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints.

--Arlo Guthrie (Alice's Restaurant)
​


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To the OP, please don't forget that you can STILL fly with your instructor, getting training, doing xc's, controlled field experience, etc, etc... you can't do the solo stuff, of course, but you CAN still fly! Then when you get this all worked out, solo and get on with your solo xc's, etc. :) Good luck! :)
 
tdager said:
Wow...so this guy was a student pilot, no X-country training, in a plane he bought two days before?

Damn...what the hell was he thinking?
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He was thinking, "Damn I'm horny! I can't wait to go see my girl!"
 
Greebo said:
He was thinking, "Damn I'm horny! I can't wait to go see my girl!"
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In this particular case though the guy could have driven his car there just about as fast as he could have flown. Who knows though, maybe this gal will do things for a pilot that she won't do for anyone else :)

My point by posting that NTSB report is that getting a medical is an important thing but hardly qualifies as something that puts you in a very exclusive club - clearly a real Darwin award candidate can get a medical. It's pretty silly some of the things you can be denied a medical for and I wonder about the efficacy/cost benefit of the whole system. We're going 'round and 'round about some conviction 19 years ago, moral character, and all the other happy crap that complicates medical certs when in most cases, it's "stupid" that causes most accidents.

If we had no medical certification, does anyone think that the accident cause of "health problem" would challenge the cause "stupid" for the top spot in the Nall Report?
 
PittsDriver said:
In this particular case though the guy could have driven his car there just about as fast as he could have flown. Who knows though, maybe this gal will do things for a pilot that she won't do for anyone else :)

My point by posting that NTSB report is that getting a medical is an important thing but hardly qualifies as something that puts you in a very exclusive club - clearly a real Darwin award candidate can get a medical. It's pretty silly some of the things you can be denied a medical for and I wonder about the efficacy/cost benefit of the whole system. We're going 'round and 'round about some conviction 19 years ago, moral character, and all the other happy crap that complicates medical certs when in most cases, it's "stupid" that causes most accidents.

If we had no medical certification, does anyone think that the accident cause of "health problem" would challenge the cause "stupid" for the top spot in the Nall Report?
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Well, I guess the Sport Pilot program will help answer that question in time.

-Rich
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
Glider pilots have been flying without medicals for a long time. What's the question?
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I think it's whether the lack of a medical requirement would allow people who are simply too dumb to fly, to fly anyway.

Frankly, I don't think it would make any difference at all in that regard. There are other safeguards (albeit imperfect ones) like the knowledge test, checkride, BFR, etc. in place to prevent the chronically dumb from flying.

But no matter how tiny a crack may be, there will always be someone who slips through it.

-Rich
 
RJM62 said:
I think it's whether the lack of a medical requirement would allow people who are simply too dumb to fly, to fly anyway.

Frankly, I don't think it would make any difference at all in that regard. There are other safeguards (albeit imperfect ones) like the knowledge test, checkride, BFR, etc. in place to prevent the chronically dumb from flying.

But no matter how tiny a crack may be, there will always be someone who slips through it.

-Rich
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I worded that poorly - my point being that if relaxing medical standards were to cause a rash of accidents due to pilot medical issues, it would have already happened in gliders.

So, there is no question to ask - it has already been answered. And the answer is "no".

You may recall the saying "You are only one medical away from becoming a glider pilot" (not that being a glider pilot is a bad thing - it's on my short list for 2010).
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
I worded that poorly - my point being that if relaxing medical standards were to cause a rash of accidents due to pilot medical issues, it would have already happened in gliders.

So, there is no question to ask - it has already been answered. And the answer is "no".

You may recall the saying "You are only one medical away from becoming a glider pilot" (not that being a glider pilot is a bad thing - it's on my short list for 2010).
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Well, not quite. The glider pilot almost always needs someone else there to aid in the launch. (Obviously, self-launch is another story.) That person could be acting as the final sanity check.

Of course, average intentelligence is frequently inversely proportional to the number of people involved. What's more dangerous than a CFI in the airplane? Two CFI's! Heaven help you when you get three! :) And there's the "hey, watch this" aspect too. Nonetheless, I think that having a hopefully responsible tow pilot (plus the wing runners, etc.) would cut down on terminally stupid glider pilots.

Same thing with balloons. They're not one-person operations.

I think that the sport pilot might be the first operation where that isn't true except for paragliders and ultralights. Are they an argument for or against?
 
gprellwitz said:
Well, not quite. The glider pilot almost always needs someone else there to aid in the launch. (Obviously, self-launch is another story.) That person could be acting as the final sanity check.
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I'm not convinced that a wing runner would be able to determine that the pilot is 5 minutes away from total heart failure, or is taking a medication on the FAA N.F.W. list. Or is a couple of hours from collapsing into unconsciousness (The M.E. missed that one with my dad).
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
I'm not convinced that a wing runner would be able to determine that the pilot is 5 minutes away from total heart failure, or is taking a medication on the FAA N.F.W. list. Or is a couple of hours from collapsing into unconsciousness (The M.E. missed that one with my dad).
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I think that this turn in the conversation was about a medical allowing us to weed out dumb pilots or Darwin Award candidates, based on Rich's and Pittsdrivers comments, not diagnose medical issues.

Of course, for some things, nearby witnesses aren't going to be able to do much to stop stupidity, but for others (obviously drunk, choosing to launch a glider into a 200' overcast, etc.), they will (or can) act to stop the problem.
 
gprellwitz said:
I think that this turn in the conversation was about a medical allowing us to weed out dumb pilots or Darwin Award candidates, based on Rich's and Pittsdrivers comments, not diagnose medical issues.
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Ok. I suspect that a trip through the NTSB data base would flag more than a few candidates...

One my favorites is the student pilot that bailed out of a C-150 on final when he ran out of gas (but he survived so doesn't qualify for the Darwin Award)

Of course, for some things, nearby witnesses aren't going to be able to do much to stop stupidity, but for others (obviously drunk, choosing to launch a glider into a 200' overcast, etc.), they will (or can) act to stop the problem.
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I'll buy that.
 
Instead of a Pardon can you retain a lawyer and have the item expunged from you record?
 
I'm going unreg for this post.

I'm not the OP - but I also have a (party to) armed robbery conviction from 16 years ago. It did not involve drugs like the OP, but pretty much the same circumstances. I was at a similar age, and my record has been clean since then. No one I associate with knows about it, except my parents and my wife. I still don't know how I'll tell my kids about it. It's just not something I mention to people when I meet them.

Anyway, no problem getting a medical back in 2000. I was issued on the spot, (not deferred). Not even a call from OKC.

Also, I must have passed the TSA check (10 years), because I now have an unescorted ID badge for our local class C with air carrier service. I also work for a gov't agency that specifically said they'd run my background, they never mentioned it. (Nor is the 'question' on the application).

Anyhow, good luck to ya. BTW - what State?
 
Unregistered said:
that is good to hear. i live in Illinois.
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I doubt you're eligible (no offense intended by stating that), but I recently had occasion to look into the sealing of criminal records in Illinois - client was acquitted of something but the arrest was showing up and interfering with some kind of license here in Colorado, so I tried to point the client in the right direction (I'm not licensed in IL). The Cook County Court and Illinois Public Defenders websites have some excellent resources on sealing/expunging records. The requirements are pretty strict, but it might be something you could look into.

Google something along the lines of "illinois seal criminal records." If you can't find it, but remain interested, make a post and I'll try to track down the links for you.
 
What does expunge really mean anyway? It doesn't make the records go away, they'll still show up on some background checks, like secret clearences. So, who are they hidden from?
 
> I must have passed the TSA check (10 years), because I now have an unescorted
> ID badge for our local class C with air carrier service.

Not necessarily, "passed." More likely, the lowest-bid contractor just pencil-whipped
the paperwork.

> I also work for a gov't agency that specifically said they'd run my background

A govt agency "Background Check" is mighty shallow. Again; almost always done by
the low-bidder. Little more than a check for outstanding warrants. Child support
tardiness is a typical trip-up. A Criminal History Check is more thorough.

An honest to goodness security clearance (TS, SCI & beyond) is the real deal. If you
want a real thrill (um, not!), sit for a two-day Life Style Polygraph, run by a
polygrapher of the opposite sex. <blush>
 
MichaelO said:
What does expunge really mean anyway? It doesn't make the records go away, they'll still show up on some background checks, like secret clearences. So, who are they hidden from?
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Expunge means that the records should be, quite literally, destroyed. As in, an order to expunge goes out from the court, directed to the various agencies involved - be it the local PD, the DA's office, the state court administrator, etc.

The files are supposed to be destroyed - burnt, shredded, whatever. There are often criminal penalties that attach to not doing so, beyond contempt of court.

Sealing is what it sounds like - access to the file is sealed to the general public, but the file doesn't go away.

An expunged file *shouldn't* show up (in theory) in most background checks; a sealed file, however, will.
 
Obi Heed Kenobi said:
Expunge means that the records should be, quite literally, destroyed. As in, an order to expunge goes out from the court, directed to the various agencies involved - be it the local PD, the DA's office, the state court administrator, etc.

The files are supposed to be destroyed - burnt, shredded, whatever. There are often criminal penalties that attach to not doing so, beyond contempt of court.

Sealing is what it sounds like - access to the file is sealed to the general public, but the file doesn't go away.

An expunged file *shouldn't* show up (in theory) in most background checks; a sealed file, however, will.
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But note if the records already have been pulled into a commercial database outside the jurisdiction of a government entity (or court), the records may still appear in a background search. For example, if you had a background check done on you for employment and the company that did the search (somebody like USIS) found the record and stuck it in their database, it may still appear. Same applies with foreign countries (like Canada) that can gain access to US law enforcement records.

Likewise, for immigration purposes the CBP/State/whomever will still ask you to disclose it. And under certain circumstances the government can go back to the court and ask that the expunged/sealed record be opened.

So, in theory, as David notes, an expungement will prevent the record from appearing, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But it is on a state-by-state basis. Some will grant a "judicial pardon" along with the expungement, some won't do an expungement at all.

Most folks don't realize how persistant records can be, especially in the computer age.
 
Even worse, some people have no idea that you can't unwrite you life. "Oh that?! That was five years ago....".............not. As I have pointed out to the board of my charitable, that IS THE PERSON contemplated for hire. I vote Nay.

Many people are pressed by circumstance, but the majority do not commit felony "as a result".
 
bbchien said:
Even worse, some people have no idea that you can't unwrite you life. "Oh that?! That was five years ago....".............not. As I have pointed out to the board of my charitable, that IS THE PERSON contemplated for hire. I vote Nay.
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Like it or not, we are in a world of "one strike, you're out".....
 
wsuffa said:
But note if the records already have been pulled into a commercial database outside the jurisdiction of a government entity (or court), the records may still appear in a background search. For example, if you had a background check done on you for employment and the company that did the search (somebody like USIS) found the record and stuck it in their database, it may still appear. Same applies with foreign countries (like Canada) that can gain access to US law enforcement records.

Likewise, for immigration purposes the CBP/State/whomever will still ask you to disclose it. And under certain circumstances the government can go back to the court and ask that the expunged/sealed record be opened.

So, in theory, as David notes, an expungement will prevent the record from appearing, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But it is on a state-by-state basis. Some will grant a "judicial pardon" along with the expungement, some won't do an expungement at all.

Most folks don't realize how persistant records can be, especially in the computer age.
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Very true. Bottom line is that once it's there, don't count on getting rid of it, even if you do go through the appropriate steps.
 
bbchien said:
Even worse, some people have no idea that you can't unwrite you life. "Oh that?! That was five years ago....".............not. As I have pointed out to the board of my charitable, that IS THE PERSON contemplated for hire. I vote Nay.

Many people are pressed by circumstance, but the majority do not commit felony "as a result".
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That, too....
 
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