teddyballgame

Carl, you are absolutely correct; and if I may be allowed to expand on your point a bit:

First of all, by "regulators", I assume you mean elected representatives, and not the FAA.

The last two times the retirement age for airline pilots was adjusted, it was strictly political.

Age 60 was the result of a wink and a nod between the first FAA Administrator, Gen. Elwood Quesada, and AA CEO C. R. Smith; the latter wanting the age cap to spare the expense of training the oldest, most senior pilots on the newly-arriving jet aircraft. Prior to that, there was no set-in-stone mandatory age limit for airline pilots that I remember.

(And Quesada wanted to go further: a career USAF man, he did not believe that civilian pilots were capable of flying jets. He wanted pilots to come right out of the military and into the left seat of those shiny new 707's, usurping the seniority system. Thankfully, in those days there was something called a "pilots' union", that used to stand up for the profession, and it put the kibosh on that nonsense...)

The Age 65 rule was fast-tracked through the House, the Senate, and the Oval Office almost within a matter of days. The FAA just stood by the wayside and watched that freight train zoom right by them. (Had it been up to the FAA to change the rule, it would still be in the exploratory committee phase. That agency moves at the speed of a glacier on anything. It took, what, five years after the Colgan crash to produce that full-of-loopholes new ATP-minimum rule?)

So if enough voters start screaming about losing air service or (horrors!) higher fares, and enough legislators start losing their non-stops home to their districts on Thursday afternoon, then we may see some movement to alleviate the situation.