About every 3 weeks or so there is a picture in the newspaper of a car in a swimming pool or inside a 7/11 store usually driven by a senior citizen who just got the pedals wrong that day. None seem to be the result of sudden incapacitation. I bet if you asked each one of these drivers a few minutes before their mishaps if they have any problems with age and driving, they'd probably tell you to #$% off, and that they are ok to drive.
You are comparing apples to oranges. You cannot compare the pilot work force with every other option and range of health and motor skills. Even if you could compare the two groups the only ones that would count among the crashed car brigade are the ones under seventy.
About every 3 weeks or so there is a picture in the newspaper of a car in a swimming pool or inside a 7/11 store usually driven by a senior citizen who just got the pedals wrong that day. None seem to be the result of sudden incapacitation. I bet if you asked each one of these drivers a few minutes before their mishaps if they have any problems with age and driving, they'd probably tell you to #$% off, and that they are ok to drive.
And no one under the age of 30 ever crashes their car. Oh no... Maybe not from incapacitation but possibly inattention or over confidence or possibly even a lack of experience.
....but possibly inattention or over confidence or possibly even a lack of experience.
Yup...case in point, the recent BA incident in the Caribbean...couldn't bother to backtrack, used improper intersection...captain demoted. All FD well under age 60, as I recall.
Maybe BA urgently needs older Commanders to keep the wheels on their ops...
why do all the low time whiners always say the same things decades later......boring! wait until you get to be in your late fifties, a couple divorces, unplanned pregnancies, a boat, a corvette, an overpriced house and a high maintenance girl friend flight attendant that you hide from wife number three. I hope you beeotch slap that same whining low timer a few decades from now just like I am doing to you right now. airlines pilots just seem to reinvent the wheel!
sounds like a great plan as long as i can pass the medical. i want to go out of this world just like my 89 year old grandpa.....a stuck mike hearing his screams......... along with the others on board.
411A your interpretation of the facts are wide of the mark...
Hardly, and the AAIB certainly agrees. IF said BA crew had bothered to backtrack, this discussion would not be taking place. I will repeat...BA needs some senior Captains to put their ops in proper perspective. Perhaps, even some older ones, called out of retirement. Otherwise...expect further difficulties.
it's AGEING that's the problem, not the AGE. I've just lost my Class 1 ( but not yet Class 2 ) due to medical issues related to ageing, I've no problem with that. S**t happens.
Competency is the issue. It is impossible to use any specific age as a point where competency ends (or begins for that matter). Degradation in competency occurs from ageing of course, as well as disease, lifestyle, and other factors.
Old F*rts lke ExSp33db1rd (and me) understand that we are degrading (in too many ways!) and we acknowledge that -- and accept it. But it can be assessed (as in his example re Class 1 v/s Class 2).
it's AGEING that's the problem, not the AGE. I've just lost my Class 1 ( but not yet Class 2 ) due to medical issues related to ageing, I've no problem with that. S**t happens.
I have held a pilots license for a little over 50 years albeit now an RPL. But over that period Our beloved CAA medical section gronded me on average once every 5 years for high BP. I still have Hi BP( by their standards, they expect a 75 year-old to have 130/70) which I have never had.
If one can dismiss the ego factor, fly to any age is acceptable provided its for the pleasure of being an individualist, which is what all pilots are like it or not. Aviation in NZ now has become an act of impossibility: with a BFR which is more stringent than a pilot issue, a medical which I have to make like I am 25 years old. More in-flight rules and restrictions and restricted airspaces in a sparsely populated rural district. I have given up. more fun in depleting my supply of scotch or gin. I wish to die gracefully, not all tensed up just before impact, wishing I was not flying today. Every body gets to where they say if honest "I GIVE UP"
Just been flying with a 16 yr. old student, today calm after the storm, visibility almost to Hawaii, flat calm sea in the Bay of Islands, R/T silent 'cos there was no one else in the sky. Magic.
but was up at 05.30 yesterday to go searching for a whale that had been spotted with a rope and a mooring buoy wrapped around its' jaw, but with a 200 ft cloud base, almost nil visibiity in rain and drizzle, decided to go back to bed. Funny that.
( didn't realise that I was an Old F*rt until recently, when the women parking her car next to mine at the Supermarket said " close your door, darling ( to her daugher, not me ) so that Old Man can get out of his car " !!
Hmmmmm, usual load of rubbish here, written by the self centred and uninformed.
However facts seem to support that age and experience equal safety.
It is a fact that the motor vehicle insurance industry offers discounts on premiums to the older driver, but also, importantly to this discussion, imposes hefty weighting to the premiums of the younger driver, especially those who are under 25. Under 25 and powerful and possibly expensive claim / vehicle is just about un-insurable in some parts these days. I wonder just why that is ?.
As far as aviation insurance is concerned, it is also a fact that re-insurance companies that deal with aviation underwriting...(Swiss re, Munich re etc) are becoming concerned at the lowering experience levels in cockpits around the world. Alarmed was the word used in one conversation that I am aware of, when the subject was being discussed in the context of the future aircraft and pilot forecasts being bandied about by Boeing and the Bus company.
Young fellas, who think that they have all the skills required, have been being trained by older fellas who know that they have the skills required, for generations. It isn't going to change. That's the way it is, and that's why we have had continual progression in flight safety over the years. We learn from experience. Statistics confirm that.
The medical industry is telling us that the lifestyle we lead is giving us longer and more healthy life spans (statistically proven) and therefore we are able to work effectively for longer than before. So it begs the question as to why pilots should not be able to continue to hold a medical and work longer than before ???, is our profession so debilitating that it precludes this.
The (aviation) medical profession is saying it isn't, and we can. Insurance companies are saying they want the experience. So I guess the younger fellas will just have to suck it up and get on with it.
Another question might centre around why those younger fellas who are already sitting in right seats, and who on this forum are denigrating the abilities of older captains, haven't seen the light. Those forecasts I mentioned are probably going to mean that they will face left seat conversions in the reasonably near future more than likely anyway. Might it be that their inability to reconcile that age and time in a cockpit (experience), equates to safety, and that lack of recognition of that fact probably makes them, when and if they make it to a command course, a little suspect in the finer points of commanding a modern airliner, and its crew. ?????
I wonder how many of them, in the fullness of time and with more experience, will revisit their views, as stated here, and have the balls to admit that they were wrong, even to themselves.
Might it be that their inability to reconcile that age and time in a cockpit (experience), equates to safety, and that lack of recognition of that fact probably makes them, when and if they make it to a command course, a little suspect in the finer points of commanding a modern airliner, and its crew. ?????
age 70 retirement....you betcha!
