Aviation medicine also known as Flight medicine or Aerospace medicine, is a preventive or occupational medicine in which the patients/subjects are pilots, aircrews, or persons involved in flight e.g cabin crew and passengers.
The specialty strives to treat or prevent conditions to which aircrews are particularly susceptible, applies medical knowledge to the human factors in aviation and is thus a critical component of aviation safety. A military practitioner of aviation medicine may be called a flight surgeon and a civilian practitioner is an aviation medical physician examiner.
Every factor contributing to a safe flight has a failure rate. The crew of an aircraft is no different. Aviation medicine aims to keep this rate in the humans involved equal to or below a specified risk level. This standard of risk is also applied to airframe, avionics and systems associated with flights
