Photo: 123rf
Civil Aviation has done a U-turn on a new system for keeping track of medical examinations of pilots and air traffic controllers.
Doctors had opposed the Civil Aviation Authority forcing them to use a new IT system, which they said would be inflexible and make it harder to access flyers' medical histories.
The agency recently defended to RNZ the rollout of the new system, called EMPIC, which it has been working on for several years. It told RNZ it could be adapted to work well here, which doctors rejected.
But now the authority has told doctors it has taken another look.
"Following the concerns raised, our project team conducted an options and impact assessment to determine how these areas could be addressed within the current EMPIC system design," it said in a letter to aviation medical examiners.
"As a result of this assessment, CAA has decided not to roll out the EMPIC medical module to medical examiners."
It was never a question of safety, project leader and deputy chief executive Mike Hill told RNZ in a statement.
"The CAA has listened to the feedback," he said.
"There are not, and have never been, any concerns about safety with regard to processing medical certificates."
This contrasts with what doctors told it.
"The out-of-date design of the EMPIC medical module, limited ability to appropriately modify forms, the cumbersome user experience for pilots and medical examiners, and inherent limitations in how important documents are stored and able to be searched all raise serious concerns," the Aviation Medical Society said in an open letter to CAA last month.
The about-turn means doctors can stick with what they are doing, while the authority will still use the new software internally.
This meant about half a million dollars of the value of the EMPIC system would not be realised, CAA said.
But it is not giving up on its original plan.
"It is our intention to continue to work with the vendor beyond the completion of the current project to develop the software to a level that would see acceptance from medical examiners for external use. In that case, those costs could then be capitalised," Hill said.
