Originally Posted by
rickair7777
Age 70? Not a chance in hell. Regardless of what a very few folks might think, at some point age really does have a hard scientific correlation to diminished cognitive capacity, short term variability in cognitive capacity, and rapidly increasing risk of sudden incapacitation. It's irrelevant how you did in the sim or the AME's office last month, if there's a significant risk of rapid decline on any given day.
Age 65 grew out of the ICAO standards, it became politically difficult to deny US pilots the right to do what foreign pilots were already doing in our airspace. Fundamentally I agree with this...was it good for me personally right now? No.
Did a few guys make out like bandits? Yes, but it was going to happen eventually anyway and SOME age group was going to get to have their cake and eat it too. Doesn't really matter who I guess.
However...I totally disagree with alpa supporting this. They are charged with representing the interests of their members, and they had polling results which clearly spelled out the position of a large majority of the membership. They should have stuck with that position, and not come up with some lame excuse not to. Personally I believe that decision was motivated by senior (ie old) leadership not wanting the thing to die on the vine...it would have come up again eventually but those guys were afraid that it might have been too late for them when it did.
This is my contention..... If ALPA saw it as inevitable, they should have done a better, more thorough job of explaining why, and cease with the polls if they don't intend to follow them......
Also, why not try and mitigate the damage to the majority of the pilots in the union by phasing in the age change over a pieriod of 10 years or so, like increase the age one year every two years. What they produced instead was a MAJOR windfall for the 59.5 yr olds and screwed everyone under 50 and over 60.
BTW, everyone's pension had been wiped away, what about the 60 yr old who has no opportunity to earn any of it back?
All you have to do is look at the leadership of ALPA at the time to see who really benefited immediately.