Originally Posted by
squawkoff
What was the initial reason for the age 60 anyway? One explanation I heard was airline execs didn’t want someone sitting at the top of the pay band until they were 80ish. Back then You couldn’t swing a dead cat and not hit an airline pilot so they forced the person at the top out and brought in someone at the bottom that was making a tenth of what the older person was. Makes perfect sense from a purely economic view. But what about all that experience walking out the door?
Close. Back in the late 50's the CEO of AA was in a labor dispute with his pilots and the ringleaders were the senior CA's (ie old guys). So he leveraged his political connections (from his wartime service to the USG IIRC) to get congress to pass the age 60 law to get rid of his in-house trouble-makers.
That's not old wives tale, it's readily verifiable fact. So the original age 60 had no basis in science or data of any sort. It was 100% pure union-busting.
IMO, given obvious advances in medicine, health, and lifestyle by 2007 the age 60 limit was due to be increased... if you argued that there was any safety basis for age 60 in the first place, you had to accept that the basis for that had changed over time.
The only question is how old is new age 60? 63? 65? 67? 70? That's a little hard to pin down precisely since age 60 had no scientific basis to begin with.
In the end it will probably come full circle right back to where it started: politics.
Originally Posted by
squawkoff
I believe it was Scott Kirby that said most of his older pilots that were close to retirement were out on sick leave. My question to Kirby would be what is your policy for being paid out for sick leave when someone retires? Is it possible they are taking the sick leave to keep from losing it? That would be my guess.
I suspect Kirby isn't very wrong. Age 67 would have minimal impact on young pilots, but some older guys would get paid longer via LTD.
But LTD depends on contract language... I know at least a couple which cap that at age 65 specifically, and I'd bet that applies to most, unless somebody's NC was really thinking ahead.
Originally Posted by
squawkoff
if they raise the age to 67 or remove it completely I would be ok with a cognitive test at 65 and older. But now that I think of it, I know some 30 year olds that would be questionable if they could pass it.
Very slippery slope. You cannot just do that for age 65+ arbitrarily, you'd lose the lawsuit on age discrimination... kind of like if you instituted cog tests only for female hispanic pilots. Federal law is very similar.
So you'd have to do some science which would take years, and the science might (probably would) dictate cog tests for younger pilots too.
Originally Posted by
squawkoff
Haven’t we recently (in the last 2 years) had several pilots in their 50s die inflight? Prior to 2021 how often did a pilot die at the controls?
It's been happening every year since the late 90's. I wasn't paying attention before that.