For readers unfamiliar with the current mandatory airline pilot retirement age in the US, it’s 65. The day you turn 65, you are no longer authorized to exercise the privileges of your airline transport pilot certificate. Your airline career is now over, which, according to the FAA, is based on the potential for cognitive decline after this point and an associated increase in mistakes, reducing operational safety.
There is however, an ongoing effort to raise the retirement age for airline pilots to 67 or beyond, or even eliminate it all together. Yet before we consider what this future might look like, as well as who is for it and who may be against it, let’s establish some context with a quick look at the past.
The first professional pilot retirement age was set in 1919 by the International Commission for Air Navigation (ICAN), that decided pilots should retire at 45, probably because the life expectancy of an airmail pilot at the time was rather bleak, so why not. After WWII though, ICAN’s successor, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), figured pilots were probably mentally and physically safe enough to fly beyond this age (and aircraft were becoming safer as well), so they elected to completely discard a retirement age for airline pilots altogether.
Then, in the early 1950s, with a surplus of young pilots who could adapt quickly to flying jet aircraft (and because they were less expensive to pay than senior captains), executives at airlines such as American, TWA, Eastern, and Western began unilaterally forcing their pilots to retire at age 60. This resulted in lawsuits from pilots and pilot unions challenging the arbitrary change, so the Federal Aviation Agency (it wouldn’t become an Administration until 1967), sided with management and formally established the “Age 60 Rule” in 1959, which went coincidentally into effect in March of 1960. A few years later ICAO reversed course and instituted an international age-60 retirement standard as well.
There it stayed until 2007, when the FAA raised it to 65, in order to align with international standards, as ICAO had just raised the airline pilot retirement age to 65 the year before, citing advancements in medical science and longer life expectancies. This proved to be convenient timing, because the rest of the story is less about sustained cognitive ability in older pilots, and more about money—but of course, it always is.
Amazingly, after 47 years and the FAA’s continued refusal to allow airline pilots to fly beyond age 60, the amendment to the long-established retirement age occurred quickly and in the middle of multiple airline bankruptcies (United, Northwest, US Airways), and general financial stress (Delta and American) in the post-9/11 period. Basically, this horrific national event was nefariously usurped by several airline management groups as a pretense to gut labor contracts, drastically reduce pay and benefits, and (this is the big one) to eliminate longstanding, well-funded, employee pensions – all under the veil of corporate bankruptcy.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) is the U.S. government entity specifically charged with and responsible for protecting worker pensions and retirement programs. In the case of these airline bankruptcies however, they failed to safeguard employee pensions and allowed them to be discarded under corporate threats of liquidation. This in turn led to the expedient justification for the FAA to implement the “Age 65 Rule.” To be fair, many airline pilots wanted to be able to work past age 60 as well, just not in-lieu of losing their pensions.
Thus, after allowing pilot retirements to be jettisoned (although many lawsuits were filed and some would recoup a small portion of their pension dollars), the U.S. government, via the FAA, benevolently enabled pilots to work for five more years, under gutted contracts and significantly decreased pay, before being shown the door. This in turn added insult to injury to what is not so lovingly referred to in the airline industry as the “lost decade,” a 10-year period of career stagnation, low earning potential, and general discontent.
The further cascading result of this conflagration was that young people became disinterested in becoming airline pilots (as were many of their parents who would be paying for flight training), to the extent that when the airlines did begin to recover and needed to start hiring pilots again, there were too few pilots available. This seemed especially acute as a retirement wave of senior pilots was commencing, thereby ushering in the panic of a “pilot shortage” as we turned the corner to the 2010s.
In reality though, this is less about an actual shortage of pilots and more about a shortage of reasonable pay and benefits, not only commiserate with professional pilot knowledge and skills, but also sufficient to pay off hefty student and training loans.
The stage is now set for next month and part two of the retirement age debate, with a look at who’s in favor of an “Age 67 Rule“ (or no retirement age at all).
Before we close, we have quick side note: For commercial (non-airline) pilots, there is no retirement age. In fact, it’s not uncommon for airline pilots to retire and then go fly for a business or charter jet outfit for a while apparently, the FAA is unconcerned about the cognitive decline of all pilots in the national airspace. Also lacking consistency is that air traffic controllers have a mandatory retirement age of 56, based on data suggesting declining performance and increasing errors after this age, though the Secretary of Transportation can delay retirement for controllers who possess exceptional skills and experience (whatever this means) to age 61.
Check back next month for the second installment of this three-part series.
