Basic MED | New FAA Medical Rules Explained
Hey guys! Jon from fly8MA.com and today we're going
to be talking about Basic MED. Those are the new rules regarding medical
certificates that just came out from the FAA. They come out May 21st of 2017. We're going to talk about how to utilize them,
how they help you, and what you need to do to actually operate under these new rules,
and how to take advantage of them. So, for starters, what is "Basic MED?" Well, Basic MED is basically what was born
from the FAA out of all of your AOPA Membership dues that you paid to AOPA. They took that, and lobbied Congress, and
they pushed Congress to pass a law that said that the FAA had to be nicer to pilots, and
basically a lot of us that fly little airplanes, if we're allowed to drive semi-trucks, boats,
RVs and all of that stuff, we should be able to fly our little airplanes too. Even if we do have a tiny, little medical
condition that may otherwise disqualify us. They kind of loosened up some of the regs
there, and they also made it so you don't have to go to an AME every time for a medical
exam.
Before, if you were over age 40, and you had
a third class medical, you had to go to your AME doctor for your medical exam, and you
had to pay them like $150, generally out of pocket, because he probably wasn't covered
by your insurance. Now we don't have to do that anymore, and
we'll talk about how exactly. For starters, what do you need to fly under
Basic MED? Well, there are a few key things. First off, you need to have a driver's license. You need to have valid US driver's license. They basically figure that in the sense that
you have a driver's license, you can see to drive, and you can pass that test, then you
should probably be okay to fly.
Maybe. So you've got to have driver's license, that's
step one. Step two, you need to have held FAA after
July 15th of 2006. If you're a brand new pilot, or maybe you're
a sport pilot, and you want to take advantage of these new rules, and you've never held
an AFA medical certificate, you're going to have to go and get one, so that you will have
held one after July 15th of 2006. It doesn't have to have been issued after
July 15, 2006, it has to have been valid after that date. So it could've been issued in 2005, 2004,
something like that. As long as it was valid after that date with
first, second or third class medical then you don't have to go and get another one.
You can just follow these Basic MED rules
that we're going to talk about here in outline. You may have no medical certificate right
now, and to get your medical back, you don't have to actually get a medical back, you just
have to follow the Basic MED rules. Pretty neat! So, for number three on the list, that is
you have to take something that's called a Comprehensive Medical Exam Checklist (CMEC)
to your primary care doctor or your family doctor when you go for your annual checkup. And you have to complete that checklist with
him. He has to actually complete it. You have to give it to him and he's going
to go through it and make sure that he conducts an exam that the FAA is satisfied with. Some doctors might just look at you and be
like, "Yeah, you're great." The FAA wants to give some guideline because
that primary care doctor that your seeing may or may not have been trained by the FAA
in Oklahoma to be an Aviation Medical Examiner. If this is just your regular family doctor
that you used to not be able to go see for your FAA Medical Exam, now you can, you just
have to see him and use the CMEC, this Checklist when you go see him.
That checklist, of course, will be available
through the FAA when it comes out in May of 2017. Next on the list, you need to get your physical
examination by a state-licensed physician, so your family doctor works. It can be covered by your health insurance
if you're going for your annual checkup anyway. And you have to have that physician complete
the CMEC, and he needs to do that every 48 months.
So, instead of going– obviously you're probably
going every year– but you need to see him at least every 48 months and have him complete
that checklist. Now the other thing you have to do is take
an online medical education course. Online Medical Examination Education Couse. So you educate yourself on how to examine
yourself and know if you're fit to fly or not. There's a lot of stuff you probably know about,
but it never hurts to know more.
The FAA wants to make sure that you know enough
to be able to self-certify, and be like, "Yeah, I'm alive, I'm not dead, that's good." Now you can do that yourself once you get
educated by the FAA rather than having her tell you. So we need to have that online course done. That online course is going to be available
from AOPA, it'll be available on our website– we'll have a link on there on fly8MA.com–
and that's going to be an FAA-sanctioned course that you can complete, and also in there,
you're going to consent to an NDR (National Driver Registry) check. Basically, they're going to make sure they
can look and see if you have any DUIs. Typically if you get a DUI, that will disqualify
you from having a Medical Certificate, and most likely disqualify you from Basic MED
as well. Not to say that once you get a DUI you can't
ever fly again, but there's a little bit of a process you have to go through and that's
something we'll talk about a different day. Anyway, what are your privileges with Basic
MED? So get rid of all that.
What can we actually do with our Basic MED
medical? It's basically third class medical, so all
those sorts of things, right? All the things you could do as a third class
medical, you could now do with Basic MED. There are a few extra stipulations though–
and they kind of make sense, they're fair enough– you can't fly with more than 5 passengers. You can still fly your Cessna 206, you can
still fly your Cherokee 6 and some of your bigger aircraft, your Cirrus with 5 seats,
that's fair game. But you can't necessarily go fly a caravan
with 14 people in it, or a Polaris.
So you can fly a complex aircraft, you can
fly retracts, all that sort of stuff. But you can't fly something that has like
14 seats in it. It's got to have less than 6 seats, and not
only you can't fly more than 5 passengers, there's also another line in the advisory
that states from the FAA, that you cannot fly an aircraft that's authorized to carry
more than 6 people. Our other stipulation is it's got to be under
6,000 pounds. So, take your airplane, put it on a diet,
and then you can go fly it. It's got to be under 6,000 pounds gross weight. That covers a lot of airplanes though. That covers your Cirruses, your Cessnas, your
Pipers, six-seat Pipers, Cessnas, Cirruses. I don't know of anything that really pushes
the limit there that has less than six seats. Most six-seat aircraft are well under 6,000
pounds. So there shouldn't be an issue there.
They kind of figure– the idea here was, "Hey,
if you can drive an SUV and be totally blind and deaf, then you should be able to fly airplanes
like that too right?" And we can carry six people and weigh six
thousand pounds, like an SUV. That was the logic behind that when they were
drafting all of this legislation way back. Another rule is that you've got to go slow–
you've got to go under 250 knots and below 18,000 feet. That's pretty cool though. I'm not going to go above 18,000 feet in a
single-engine airplane unless it's turbocharged and you have oxygen or its pressurized. You'd have a hard time getting up there. Below 18,000 feet, below 250 knots indicated,
so you can still actually go really fast because 18,000, 250 knots indicated, that's pushing
into the 300 range. You can still go very fast. But that probably disqualifies your Polarises
and things like that from the equation, maybe some of your TBMs might be off the table as
well. You still have plenty of other options there
on the rest of the small airplane market. Next thing we want to talk about is: what
do you need to do to maintain your Basic MED medical.
We'll put "medical" in quotes because it's
not really a medical, right? But what do you need to do to maintain it? Obviously, you have to do that CMEC checklist
with your doctor, or with some sort of state-licensed physician, every 48 calendar months, or within
the past 48 months. And you have to keep a copy of that so you'll
want to have a copy of that filed away somewhere to show that you did complete that– he completed
it, and you did that within the past 48 months. Then you also need to make sure that you're
not being treated by a physician for anything that's disqualifying. And there's a whole thing of illnesses they'll
talk about on that online course, and a whole list on the FAA website.
But if you're being treated for a disqualifying
condition, you can't go flying. Really, if you even have a disqualifying condition
you can't go flying. But certainly, if you're being treated for
one, they felt that they should actually write that down in the advisory circular so we went
ahead and wrote it down here too. Then also, you need to make sure that you
have the course completion certificate so when you take the course from AOPA through
fly8MA.com, whatever it is, and you take that Basic MED course completion certificate, you
have to keep a copy of that. That's going to start to serve like carrying
around your medical. They haven't really given us any clear indications
as to if you need to carry it around on your person, or if you just have to keep it somewhere
safe, like in your logbook at home, if you leave that at home. But we'll see how things play out. They'll give us some indication probably come
May of 2017 when things get a little more clear. Also, that course completion certificate must
have been done within 24 calendar months.
Not that difficult really. Once every two years you've got to take an
online course, and once every four years, your doctor has to do a little checklist with
you when you go in for your annual checkup. Really simple, it saves you some money. You don't have to go patronize your local
AME anymore and give $150 for that third class medical, and so now, things are a lot easier
for us.
Now, as far as what you can do with this. We talked about what you can do with it, and
it does cover CFIs. It specifically states in the advisory circular
that, "Hey, if you're a CFI, as long as you're not pilot in command, or even if you are acting
as pilot in command, you have Basic MED, you can do that." You just can't work for hire and remember
CFIs technically don't fly for hire. We're just compensated for our instructional
services, but we're not actually flying for hire.
Other things: you can be a safety pilot still. Safety pilots have to be fully qualified,
capable crew members. Basic MED makes you fully qualified, capable
provided you're a safety pilot on something, say, like a 172 or a 182 building some sim-time
with a partner. You can still do those sorts of things. Basic MED is really cool. We've got a link in the description below
to our website, and we'll be posting come May the link of their course for you to take
to go ahead and qualify for Basic MED.
Hopefully, you found this informational, and
if you have any questions leave them in the comments below, but also there's a link on
fly8MA.com to the advisory circular that really spells everything out from the FAA. It gives you a few examples and really goes
into detail, and answers a lot of questions that you may have about this. But don't hesitate to shoot your questions
in the comments below. We'll try to answer them the best we can. Make sure you give us a thumbs up, subscribe
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