Originally Posted by
rcole
Would you rather have a healthy 75 year old with normal vision, excellent health and a lifetime of experience flying you around or the 45 year old that is overweight and barely able to pass the medical exam flying you around..? Whatever happened to common sense? We have testing and screening for a reason. Let it function. Away with arbitrary and unreasonably discriminatory rules.
I don't want the 75 year old, period.
The problem is not sudden incapacitation, which is what the Medical Certificate system is designed to protected against, it is cognitive decline.
We can not even reliably diagnose early Alzheimer's, let alone determine that someone is getting through a PC based on 40 years of practice but will be clueless on a real world crappy non-precision approach.
Some careers lend themselves to old age, lawyers for example. Others do not, such as professional racing, law enforcement and ATC. We fall in the later group. And until there is a way to evaluate cognitive decline at what are for the general population low levels, we have little choice but to draw a hard line.
And yes, Parts 91 and 125 have older pilots. They also have stories about pilots who should have retired but didn't.