You got at a major at 25? Well some of us did not get there until 9 years later. So I would vote to extend the age limit to 68 in heart beat. That way you too have too have the option to work longer if you like.

Everyone needs to just sit back and take a chill pill. The Fed govt has been and is working feverishly on destroying US demand/economy as fast and they can. High oil prices, high inflation has happened before and it's called stagflation. Unfortunately I predict in a year we will all be sitting around reminiscing "remember how there was a pilot shortage????"

Retirement age 67
 

I agree that will (for those reasons) will never have a single pilot.

But I also don’t think we will ever have no pilot (ground based) aka UAS either. With no pilot, you need a ground based link, any link can be hacked and plane flown into building.

Flying boxes or pax. It’s not a safety of normal flight issue, it’s a potential to do great damage if hacked into issue.

The only time you are going to see a no pilot is when it is programmed at the gate, verified, closed out (i.e. impossible to change) and is then released to next gate with probably 3-5 alternates since no outside influences could affect its algorithm for last min changes. And that’s pretty far away technology.

Or maybe a ground based link that gets terminated below 10k’. So it has to revert to on board programming or climb to 10k to ‘ask’ for advice or which preprogrammed alt you think it should go to. But below 10k it can’t be hacked or commanded to fly into a building.

I do like the irony; discussing how technology will never develop to allow safe air travel without pilots in the flight deck. The same conversation could have been had 150 years ago and the idea of flying planes in general.

Our entire industry is based on a concept that most people never thought could happen

I think it will happen. But anyone with extensive technical and regulatory (political) awareness knows it's a long way off. In addition to being technically feasible, it has to be cost effective and also the transition has to be cheap... if the transition involves expensive automation technology AND two safety pilots for many years, airlines might pass on that. Managers may not want to operate in the red for many years (losing all their bonuses, etc) just to set their successors up for future success. They do not have an ultra-long term outlook.

Also it's going to take a lot of government involvement, including expensive re-engineering of the NAS. All for what? To eliminate 100,000 good-paying union jobs and make half of the population even more nervous about flying? Yeah the fed will get right on that...

My swag: if you're old enough to read this, you'll be able to retire out of a two-person cockpit. If you fly pax. They might let cargo go single pilot at some point (might be where they accumulate the years of operational data).

Programming a computer to fly a plane isn't that hard in the grand scheme of things. I mean GA aircraft already have an auto-land feature.

But we don't get paid to fly as much as we get paid to make decisions. And the AI that can replace a human on that level of decision making is decades off, if not a century. But yeah, it will happen eventually.

So does my airliner. I can turn the AP on at 100' out of BOS and leave it on until 80 kts on LAX 24R.

But about every 2-3 years the AP disconnects randomly for no apparent reason. If the company pays me and the other guy say $1.8M over three years to turn the AP back on once, it's money well spent.

So kind of like Joe Biden, at 79, only needing to push the big button once?

You're making a case for no maximum age for pilots. I don't like that.

sounds like you not only should have come back sooner….you shouldn’t have chosen the airline with the EXPECTED decade-long upgrade. Got it. Now older guys owe you something due to that…..


(this whole thread is verbal masturbation, anyways. All these guys saying “it’s a NO from me”…..pffft….you don’t get a vote. None of us do.)

Alpa members had a vote last time. The first vote was a no and nothing happened with legislators. Roughly a year later and several pensions disappearing it was voted again and passed. Shortly after passed in Congress. That’s how I remember it anyhow. However, I agree this time will most likely be different due the shorter timeline.