Not only pilots. Truck driver resting time is heavily regulated to the point the need to record start and end or they will be fined at best. Their employers will also be on the hook if drivers are non compliant.

A truck driver! But doctors? No… they are Uberhuman and can make life or death decisions after 24 hours on call and awake. Ridiculous. It is a topic that angers me a lot.

This happens in Portugal as well as Poland, it indeed feel universal. I think the reason is that doctors are kind of like gods: in the hour of your biggest need it is them that can help, therefore they are highly respected and have huge influence over a wide cross section of society. Everybody will eventually need a doctor in their life.

Another pet outrage topic related to doctors is the amount of time they need for training. They train almost 12 years after high school before they are qualified. What a wasteful training. They learn lots of generalities to the specialize in the end. With a 10 or 12 year higher education you are speaking about phd or post docs for a profession that requires 1 for every 1000 citizens. Imagine that ratio of phds and post docs. Is being a GP really requiring such training? I don’t think so and agree with above posts that their duties should be broken down, opened and delegated.

Pilot failures are really visible, and kill hundreds atll at once. Bad medical decisions lead to more deaths overall, but it's far less likely the public will hear it, and even if they do, it's one person at a time.

Far more people die from car crashes than airplane crashes too: It's not even close. And yet, people who have no business behind a wheel drive, and the penalties for being a poor driver are typically minimal. Same difference.

And the pilot is quite likely to die in any fatal pilot error, so there's an element of self-interest in preventing pilot error.

Because when there is no pilot, the airplane simply does not fly. Nobody dies, there is just an economic damage. But if there is no doctor, people still get ill, and then people die. Which makes it ethically easy to impose the one but not the other. And which is also the reason why pilots can go on strike, while the same is much more limited for any kind of (medical) care job.

When a pilot or a truck driver fall asleep, it’s easy to see the cause and effect. When sleeping, they can’t control the vehicle.

With other professions, the people are awake, their brain just isn’t functioning properly, so it’s easier for people to ignore the true cause, since well rested people can make mistakes too.