I did not find much information on the Internet on how to get a flight medical certificate at the age of 59 in the Philippines. At the off-chance that somebody at my age is out there who wants to give it a try, this post will hopefully help a bit.

As in Malaysia and the US, there are three classes of Medical Certificates for pilots in the Philippines.

For PPL you need a class 2 medical and for CPL and for an instrument rating you will need a class 1 medical. The class 3 seems to be for air traffic controllers.

My first step is to convert my plain-vanilla FAA PPL to a CAAP PPL, so I went for a class 2 medical. The place to go for this is the CAAP compound near the NAIA airport.

Depending on your age and depending on whether this is your first time medical exam with CAAP, you will have to undergo different exams. In my case, I had to to do the following:

• Blood CBC and urine analysis (Not the same as complete blood chemical. See below.)
• Chest X-Ray
• Dental exam (I don’t know what this is for, but maybe in case of an accident, they can identify you by your dental record?)
• Eye examination
  They do the color vision test with numbers and characters surrounded by colored dots , far sight and near sight, with glasses and without glasses. You can bring separate glasses for far and near sightedness or glasses with bifocal and progressive lenses. If you need glasses, they will show ups on your medical certificate as “limitation” and you will have to wear them and have them with you when you fly.
• Treadmill stress test. You can do this at the CAAP facility or at an external lab. For example, Clark Medical City and High Precision Diagnostic in Angeles do this sort of thing. The problem with external labs is that they require a doctor’s referral first. If you do it at the CAAP facility, you need to call the Cardiology Department ((02) 8246 4988, extension 2149) to make a separate appointment. The appointment you make with the online OFSAM appointment system on the CAA website is not enough!
• Drug Test
  This test cannot be administered at the CAAP facility, but here are many test labs that do this test. I did mine at the High Precision lab in Angeles. The standard test (Met/Shabu and THC/Marihuana) is sufficient.
• Complete Blood Chemical (specifically asking for HbA1c results).
  This needs to be done at an external lab as well. As far as I can tell, there is no doctor referral needed, but if the lab is asking for it, for Php 1,000 you can get a referral from pretty much any doctor. I am doing my blood chem every 4 months anyway. I use High Precision Diagnostic. They have branches in Angeles, Tarlac City and Subic.
• True Tone Hearing test.
  This cannot be done at the CAAP facility (see below).

If you want to get everything done in one visit of CAAP, I suggest you bring the following:

• Complete blood chem results, not older than 30 days.
• Drug test result, not older than 30 days
• True Tone hearing test. I did mine at the Active Hearing Center at Clark SM. I got a referral from a doctor at Clark Medical City for this, and also took back the results and got a medical certificate from the same doctor. However, I don’t think referral or certificate are necessary. The doctor at CAAP only looked at the True Tone graphs.
• Any prescriptions you may have for medicine you take regularly. You have to note this on the medical certificate application and it seems important if your blood chemistry shows any deviation from the norm.
• Glasses. I got new glasses from EO the day before I went to CAAP. EO also gave me a medical certificate. My certificate shows -0.5 for one eye and -1.0 for the other (same for far and near). If I interpreted the CAAP result correctly, with glasses I had a 20/20 eyesight. In other words, if you have similar eye sight as me, you are probably going to be ok.

Once you have everything prepared, the only other prerequisite to get the medical done is a PEL. The PEL is basically your unique identifier in the CAAP system. You can get the PEL by filling in your application form (in my case the form for Validation of a Foreign License) and hand it over to the lady at window 1. This is at the licensing department opposite the multistory car park.

With this PEL you go to the back of the same building. There, a guy at a desk next to the entry will hand over a list of examinations (with prices) and a form to fill in.

You take the list with the examinations to the cashier, which is in the same building. I paid ₱1,350. The operation is very efficient. They take cash and I was told they take GCash as well, but I did not try that.

Then you go back to medical area and start your round based on the checklist you got from the guy next to the door.

Again, this is very fast and efficient. I went to the lab first for pee and blood, then eye exams (far and close, with and without glasses), then dentals, then x-ray. In my case, everything was very fast. I did not have to wait at any of the stations. All this before noon, even so I only had an appointment for the afternoon

Finally you go to the airmen examination room and hand over your checklist and filled in form. The lady will collect ₱500 for the doctor and ask you to wait. There is a waiting area in front of the counter.

There is a different doctor, depending on the day of the week. The name of the doctor is listed on the CAAP/OFSAM online appointment page. The doctor asked me some questions about my blood chemistry results, the blood pressure and who wanted to know specifically which maintenance medicine I am taking on a regular basis. In the end she handed me back my application form with a sticky note that listed the missing tests, which in my case were a drug test and the treadmill stress test.

I thought it would be better to do the stress test at an external lab, but in the end it was more convenient and probably a lot cheaper to do it at the CAAP site. They do stress tests only on one day per week. It was easy to make an appointment via phone. I paid PHP 1,680 for the treadmill test and PHP 500 for the doctor. The doctor told me after the test that I had passed.

The lady at the airman examination room told me that my medical certificate would be available in a few working days. I picked it up the following Monday, but I suspect it was ready on Thursday or Friday already.

At my age, the class 2 medical certificate is good for one year. It can be renewed 28 days before expiry to avoid any down time.

And there you have it. Good luck if you are planning to do the same.