Even at face value…that’s a perfectly legit reason. The people close to retirement have moved up thanks to mandatory retirement their whole career, and now want to make that pause just as they hit their personal maximum seniority, providing everyone else with a stagnation, and a reduction in peak seniority for anyone who either medicals out or isn’t willing to be a flying corpse. It’s pure selfishness on their part. So you’re not close. So what. Doesn’t make it right.

However, safety is a very valid argument, and its pretty funny that you’re going to complain about intellectual dishonesty, and then pretend people don’t decline as they age, or acknowledge that we have no good systems to catch that and mitigate the risk to safety it poses.