I am in favor of an increase in mandatory FAR 121 airline pilot retirement age, provided the FAA comes up with a meaningful set of criteria for AMEs (Air Medical Examiners). The FAA 1st Class Airman's Medical Certificate should require a much more rigorous physical exam than now. The current system looks only for gross abnormalities, with subtle physical and/or cognitive deterioration generally overlooked.
It will be up to the pilots and their airlines to work out the details of retirement systems. There should be provisions for early retirements and
penalty-free medical retirements between 60-65. The percentage of airline pilots on medical disability generally increases exponentially as pilot ages approach 60. At my airline, almost 10% of the seniority list (including me) is on long-term disability (aka LTD or "medical retirement", although return to flying is possible from LTD but not from voluntary early retirement).
Increasing the mandatory retirement age for FAR 121 pilots also solves another sticky wicket for the federal government. As it stands now, those pilots whose pensions have been terminated (EAL, DAL, UAL, US, TWA, and others) are penalized severely by the PBGC. The current mandatory age-60 retirement is treated like a 5-year "early" retirement by the PBGC, and PBGC "pensions" paid to pilots are reduced by almost 33% over what the age-65 amount would be. To add insult to injury, the full age-65 PBGC "pension" amount is, typically, a very small fraction of the pensions that the pilots' unions negotiated,
in lieu of wages (every contractual gain has a cost), that were subsequently terminated by management-friendly federal bankruptcy judges operating in the extremely hostile airline labor environment of the Bu$h administration. In fact, the US Airways pilots pension plan was terminated by a federal bankruptcy judge on 3/31/2003 at the request of US Airways then-CEO Dave Siegel. Siegel was fired a few months later, by the board, and sent home (and to his second home, on St. Martins) with a measly $10-million.
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