Never too old?

I can still remember receiving that first letter from the airlines outlining their requirements. At the top of the list was maximum age – 27 years. If your application was on file and you had cause to blow out the candles on your 27th birthday cake, shortly thereafter another letter would arrive from the airlines. This one would bid your application adieu as you were now apparently too old for them to realise a return on their investment. Your ticket into the airlines had expired and now it was time to rethink your flying career.

From memory, it was around the late 80s or early 90s when this age restriction was relaxed or seen as discriminatory. Or perhaps the airlines just realised that 20 or so years were enough to recoup the cost of a 727 endorsement. For whatever reason, new recruits with grey hair started to appear in the right hand seat of Australian airliners and a different timeframe began to form on the expectations of an airline career.

In fact, there was a decided shift in the demographic. The pilots began to have more experience on joining the airline and a greater number of senior military pilots started to appear. The result was a more experienced and diverse workforce entering the flightdeck and a new crop from which flight department managers could emerge. It was a brave new world that began to emerge.

However, just as the entry door had originally been closed on the 27th birthday, the exit door was opened at the ripe old age of 55 or 60.

Now as the joining age had been raised, the pressure grew on when it was time to call it quits. Initially the bar was moved to 60 and it has steadily continued to rise ever since. Today, should you be able to hang onto your pilot’s medical certificate, there is no reason why an airline career can’t extend to three score years and 10. In fact today there are airline pilots that have reached the magical milestone of 70.

In some cases international airspace rules have set an upper limit that restrict today’s pilots from operating beyond Australian shores over the age of 65. Other than that, there are really no legal grounds to ease a healthy pilot from the flightdeck as long as he or she continues to meet the checks and standards imposed upon them. So how has this changed the industry?

An article in a major paper some time ago discussed the ageing pilots in Air New Zealand ranks. On one side of the coin, younger pilots were frustrated at the lack of career progression caused by senior pilots failing to retire while on the other hand a group of older pilots were suing the company, “claiming they retired or were demoted between 2003 and 2006 without being told that international rules were changing that would have allowed them to continue in their positions”. There are definitely two sides to this story.

It is difficult to bundle the situation into one category as every individual’s circumstances are different. For some, their airline career may only have begun in their latter years, while the ever-changing situation with the economy and superannuation can cast a veil of uncertainty over the years of retirement. The top earners in the left hand seat of wide-bodied aircraft with a healthy nest egg will always be cited as the case in point, but they are not necessarily the norm.

Still, there is no doubt the issue rankles those pilots whose careers are seemingly on hold while those at the top end delay their exit from the flightdeck. They perceive those senior pilots as having had their turn and now in the spirit of the game it is time to offer their subordinates a chance to move onwards and upwards. However, in sport, politics and real life, the spirit of the game has generally given away to the word of law in modern times.

The fallout is a level of disgruntlement amongst some of their number, while a good many recognise that the slowed career progression may well necessitate delaying their own retirement. Any backlog is set to grow rather than reduce, so the message filtering down to potential new recruits is far from heartening and offers up another way in which an airline career ‘ain’t what it used to be’.

Interestingly, the defence forces don’t seem to have this problem. The army and navy will accept new recruits into their late 40s in some cases and even the air force sets its bar at around 43 years of age. Even so, they have a compulsory retirement age set at 60 and all that needs to be achieved before then is to ensure that return of service obligations can be met in the available time. Unlike the airlines, what the military does not have is a rigid seniority system where everything is based on a pilot’s date of joining the company. Experience, merit, qualifications, development courses and the like tend to count for more than an arbitrary date.

For the moment at least, the aging airline pilot workforce is not a legal issue but an emotive one. It will continue to create rumblings of discontent in the ranks, but in the black and white of day the verdict is clear – as long as a pilot is competent and fit, then he or she has the right to continue flying.

Perhaps the real question lies at the other end of the scale. Are those pilots that extend their career missing out on valuable years of enjoyment in retirement while they are still physically active enough to enjoy them? Perhaps only time will tell.