Air cadet with perforated eardrums

[chickbean]

DS (14) has had perforated eardrums for several years. He was due to be assessed for an operation to close them when he was 12, but as this fell in the Covid years it never happened. His hearing is slightly impaired when he has a cold, but is otherwise okay. He rarely has ear infections now. He is an air cadet and we declared his ears on the medical form. Due to go gliding tomorrow, but just been told that he can't because of his ears. Am pretty annoyed, because this has been in his medical information all along and he was really excited about going. I will be contacting his audiologist, but in the meantime, does anyone know whether this would prevent him from ever flying?

As far as I know it's considered safe to fly with a perforated eardrum.

Meant to say, that we have flown with him, but this is a question about him actually doing the flying.

I never understand why companies ask for medical information. None of them have the knowledge to understand it, so everything becomes a blanket ‘no’. Filling in forms when you go to the spa etc. it smells of a massive arse covering exercise. If you know he can fly, can you withdraw the medical information. Even to say “wrong child, muddled him with his brother” etc.

Shouldn't make any difference?

The gliders are military registered aircraft so will come under Military Aviation Authority rules rather than Civil Aviation Authority rules so it could be something to do with that.

They still should have picked it up sooner though.

If his eardrums still have perforations that have not self-healed over in this amount of time he needs grafts! I’m shocked he hasn’t to be frank. And yes, he should not be allowed to fly any aircraft, it’s very different to being a passenger with perforations! No way I’d willingly get into any aircraft with a pilot flying with perforations. You can have low level infection that is pretty much ‘baseline’ for everyday purposes but pressure/altitude can set things off pretty quickly with ears and not a risk you can take with a pilot/flight crew (but you could take as a passenger).

Sry, didn’t realise zombie, got similar threads mixed with recent topic threads.

It's likely that although the squadron knew about his medical history that they've just sent through the details to the gliding school and it's been flagged whilst filling out their risk assessments.