More info on the crash and autopsy of Doc.
An autopsy on Roy Halladay, the retired major league baseball star who died last fall in the crash of his light sport airplane, shows the former athlete survived the crash into the Gulf of Mexico and died from drowning and blunt force trauma, according to an autopsy report.
That Halladay, 41, was not killed on impact, but lived long enough so that he drowned should prompt some reflection on the behavior of the boaters who arrived on the scene with cameras rolling but do not appear to have investigated whether the pilot of the airplane could have been rescued. The video shows that at least three boats were very close to the barely submerged airplane some time before the Coast Guard arrived.
A video shot by one of the boaters right before the accident, Halladay's plane is seen maneuvering at low altitude before it hits the water. The alarmed men then speed to the scene.
Whether Halladay, who was alone in the airplane that morning, could have survived had he been pulled out of the water in a timely fashion is not addressed in the report according to Bill Pellan, director of investigations for the District 6 Medical Examiner, which covers two counties in the Tampa area.
"Our office is not in a position (to answer that) because our physicians don’t treat the living and we are not trauma physicians," Pellan told me when I asked if Halladay could have been saved. Pellan said that question is best answered by a trauma physician who could look at the injuries from the impact and determine if they were survivable.
In an air accident, the question of survivability is often part of the investigation.
There is little doubt that the National Transportation Safety Board will take note of other points made by the medical examiner - that traces of drugs banned or restricted for pilots were found in Halladay's system including morphine, amphetamines and zolpidem also known as Ambien.
The Federal Aviation Administration bans the use of morphine, a pain reliever, by pilots and restricts the use of the sleeping medication zolpidem to not closer than 24-hours before flight. Halladay's level of zolpidem was 72 nanograms per milliliter nearly 50% higher than the level considered to cause impairment in drivers.
In a report on drugs and driving by the Food and Drug Administration issued the same month as the Halladay crash, scientists wrote that pairing sleep medication with amphetamines (stimulants) can increase risk taking and aggressive driving.
Even though amphetamines are often included in drugs used to treat attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, the FAA does not allow their use by active pilots.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christi.../#320dbc5b4eda 
