Originally Posted by gloopy

Managing your fatigue is only one element of it.

Even the best MLB pitchers will never take themselves out of the game. They always want the ball. Just one more batter, come on coach, they can do it.

Age related declines aren't a binary issue; they're progressive and iconsistent to predict and measure. That's why an age limit exists in the first place. Its just a last line of defense against something that's very real but by its nature very difficult to accuratly pinpoint at given measurement time.

Even if we had some magical First Class Medical that could somehow accuratly, consistantly and fairly measure an exact cognitive metric, we'd still have to buffer it with something prior to that metric. And we don't have anything like that in the first place.

The effects of aging are real and they are relevant to this profession. While there may be some 90 year olds or 9 year old Capt Dougie Howser, ATP's out there who could do it on a flight by flight basis, we as a species lose cognitive ability with age. Its not at all unfair to have a reasonable stop gap age even if its not the one and only one way to address human age related cognitive issues.