Back when the retirement age was 60 the old guys had 2 and a half years till social security kicked in at 62.5 years old. So now the can work all the way to 65 or cut out a little early. Course then you have the guys that medical out before 65 and that is a surprisingly high number. So have we really hurt anything.
But yes a lot of them would already have started retiring by now and there would be a pretty constant flow of people off the top end. Just look at the numbers of people that are set to retire from United/Delta/American that were laid out in one of the other threads. So you could argue that pushed back to when the 60 rule would have hit we could have kept that many people on the bottom end of the seniority lists from being furloughed.
Or mainline could have parked more airplanes and farmed it all out to the regionals for crap wages and thus continued to ruin our careers anyway. either way we get screwed right?