Some.... minor Info for the champions of age discrimination on this forum:
History of age 60 in USA:
History of age 60 in Canada: (at the bottom of this post)
James A. Fitts says his parents thought he was crazy when as a boy of 5 in 1940 he began drawing pictures of sleek airplanes with swept-back wings and no propellers. But Mr. Fitts was convinced that he would one day pilot such seemingly outlandish aircraft, and he was right.
After flying fighters and reconnaissance jets in the Air Force, he spent 26 years as a commercial airline pilot, logging 31,000 hours in the air. But his career ended abruptly two days before he turned 60 on June 18, 1995, when, like all commercial airline pilots, he was forced to retire.
''I miss it so much,'' said Mr. Fitts, who still sometimes co-pilots a private jet for a corporation close to his home near Des Moines. ''I just love hauling people around.''
At a time when Americans are living longer than ever, when Congress is raising the Social Security retirement age to 67 from 65, and when Senator John Glenn, 77, is about to go back to outer space, the Federal Aviation Administration is still forcing airline pilots to retire at age 60, in one of the last remaining examples of Government-sanctioned age discrimination.
The so-called age-60 rule, which applies only to commercial airline pilots, was put in place in 1959 to promote safety. But the rule was disputed from the beginning, attracting numerous legal challenges and studies that concluded the rule had no medical rationale.
Still, the F.A.A. has steadfastly maintained that despite the growing sophistication of flight simulators and other tests, there is no way to determine whether pilots over 60 might suddenly drop dead in the cockpit or suffer a ''subtle degradation'' of their mental faculties.
Tomorrow, in the latest bid to overturn the rule, the Supreme Court will announce whether it will hear the appeal of a group of pilots who contend that the regulation violates the Federal law barring age discrimination. But even if the court chooses not to take up the case -- a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals voted 2 to 1 last July to uphold the rule -- the older pilots have vowed to fight on.
''If Glenn can go into space at 77, why can't we fly to Cleveland at 60?'' said Bert Yetman, 65, the president of the Professional Pilots Federation, which has taken the lead in opposing the rule.
The answer, according to former F.A.A. officials, airline executives and sympathetic younger pilots, is not concerns about safety but politics. The Air Line Pilots Association, which represents most of the country's 80,000 commercial airline pilots, once led the fight against the age-60 rule. But now the union is its biggest champion.
Union officials say their members believe the rule enhances safety. But others say the union is more concerned that allowing older pilots to fly longer would make it more difficult for its younger members to move up the seniority ranks into the captain's seat.
''It's not a medical issue,'' said Donald D. Engen, the F.A.A. head in the mid-1980's. ''The younger guys want the older guys out because they want to be captain. Captains draw the bigger pay.''
Since 1987, mandatory retirement has been outlawed for all but a handful of jobs. Aside from the pilots, the exceptions -- including air traffic controllers and police and fire officers -- were permitted by Congress and aroused little controversy.
A demographic bulge of pilots who joined the airlines in the late 1960's and 70's is rapidly approaching 60, bringing more pilots than ever face to face with the rule. Many older pilots, especially those with lucrative pension plans, favor early retirement. They fear that raising the retirement age would threaten a special tax exemption that enables them to collect their full corporate retirement benefits without penalty at 60 rather than 65.
But many of the pilots fighting the age-60 rule worked at airlines that went bankrupt in the aftermath of the industry's deregulation 20 years ago. Because every airline operates on a seniority system, each time the pilots joined a new carrier they were forced to work their way up from lower-paying jobs in the second or third seat in the cockpit.
''It's kind of ironic that just when the slot machine starts to pay off, you have to pack it in and walk out of the door,'' said L. Brandon Smithe, 58, a captain at American Airlines who spent 18 years at Continental Airlines before it entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1983 in order to break its union contracts.
While pilots his age who spent their careers at American will retire with a lump sum of $2 million plus a pension, Mr. Smithe said he would only receive about a quarter of that.
Compared with the main pilots' union, the older pilots have little influence. The Air Line Pilots Association contributed nearly $900,000, mostly to Democrats, in the last campaign and $1.3 million in 1992 and 1993, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington research group.
Two years ago, when the Professional Pilots Association persuaded the House Appropriations Committee to authorize a new study of the rule by the National Transportation Safety Board, the Air Line Pilots Association got the full House to prohibit the safety board from spending any money on the examination.
David Hinson, the F.A.A. administrator from 1993 to 1996, said it was clear to him that his superiors at the Transportation Department were not eager to take on the rule. ''It was a subject that they did not want to put on the table,'' he said.
For their part, the major airlines are now indifferent to the rule; some would like to see experienced pilots fly longer while others do not want to upset a system that seems to work.
Supporters of the rule acknowledge that the choice of 60 is arbitrary. It originated in the 1950's, when three airlines, including American, tried to force their pilots to retire at that age, citing airline safety. After a labor arbitrator ruled against the airlines, C. R. Smith, then American's president, appealed privately to his friend, Elwood Quesada, a former Air Force general who was the F.A.A.'s first administrator.
General Quesada got the rule passed in December 1959, even though an internal memo from the agency's Civil Air Surgeon expressed concern that the agency had no ''scientific or factual justification.'' General Quesada retired a year later and joined the board of American Airlines.''I don't think anybody has ever said that there is anything magical about an age-60 limit,'' said Dr. Jon Jordan, the Federal Air Surgeon. The point, he said, was that the risk of catastrophic illness or mental deterioration rose with age and that 60 was seen as the appropriate place to draw the line.
But the rationale for picking 60 has become less supportable over the years. Aviation authorities in Europe, Australia and elsewhere that once followed the F.A.A. have raised the mandatory retirement age for their airline pilots to 65. At least two F.A.A.-sponsored studies since 1981 have concluded that there is no evidence that accident rates increase as pilots get older. The most recent study, in 1993, concluded the F.A.A. could ''cautiously'' raise the age to 63.
The older pilots say they must still pass the semiannual physical exam required by the F.A.A. They are willing to undergo other tests, like the quarterly checkups on a flight simulator now required in Britain, where the retirement age was raised to 65 four years ago.
But after its last review of the rule in 1995, the agency not only decided to maintain 60 as the cutoff, it also extended the rule to commuter planes capable of carrying 10 or more passengers, saying it would raise the level of safety. Previously, pilots of commercial planes able to carry up to 30 passengers did not have a mandatory retirement age.
Dr. Jordan said the F.A.A. could not extend the age limit because there were no data available on the performance of commercial airline pilots over 60.
But the F.A.A. has refused repeated requests to waive the rule for selected pilots in order to obtain such data because, Dr. Jordan said, the lack of data means there is no sure method to choose a test group of pilots that could safely fly past 60.
''The agency's complacent acceptance of this Catch-22 situation, particularly given that the result is the continuation of a government-imposed regime of age discrimination, seems to me to be the epitome of arbitrary action,'' Judge Patricia Wald wrote in her dissent to last year's Court of Appeals decision upholding the rule.
The pilots say that the main reason airplanes have two-member crews is so that if the pilot becomes incapacitated, the co-pilot can take over. They add that the experience gained from years in the cockpit makes older pilots actually safer.
''If you were wrongfully accused of murder, would you go out and find a first-time lawyer or get F. Lee Bailey?'' said David Cronin, 69, a former captain with United Airlines.
In 1989, Mr. Cronin drew on his experience to bring a crippled 747 to a safe landing in Hawaii in 1989 after one of the plane's cargo doors blew off, killing nine passengers. A month later, just before his 60th birthday, he was forced to retire.
Mr. Cronin and other opponents of the rule argue that the F.A.A. regularly allows younger pilots who have had heart attacks, psychological problems or difficulties with drugs and alcohol to return to the cockpit.
''I never had a day sick, never had an organ transplant, never had a drug or alcohol problem,'' said Mr. Yetman, the Professional Pilots Federation president, who flew for Southwest Airlines until he turned 60 in 1993. ''I just had an unfortunate birthday.''
History of age 60 in Canada:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=6a ... %2C4028935
