Originally Posted by
DuctOvht
As I said, we all signed up to retire at 65. I’d sincerely like to retire before that if I can. For that to happen, my career needs to pan out the way I expected it to when I signed on the dotted line. I know there are pension issues in a number of airlines at the moment, but that is another debate.
No we didn’t “all sign up to retire at 65” many of us will have expected to retire at 55 or later 60 when we “signed up.” Even then, with the option to retire anything up to 5 years earlier on reduced pensions. For men, that was anything up to 15 years (if you took your occupational pension at the earliest normal qualifying date) before the state pension kicked in. The reality is that the world has moved on over the last few decades. Combine technological improvements to safety, improvements to medical stability in previously disqualifying conditions, and wholesale legislative changes to equality and state welfare regulation, and it is a whole new ball game whether you like it or not.
With current mandatory pilot retirement and state pension age only 1 year apart, today the margin is in fact the narrowest it has ever been (although that is currently set to widen again).
Another unfortunate reality is that in many cases the occupational pensions that pilots “signed up” to decades ago, didn’t live up to the promises and expectations that always allowed for that careful fiscal planning to bear the fruit it supposedly promised.
For those pilots that wanted to, needed to, and were medically fit to do so, it wasn’t unreasonable that they continued flying beyond their once planned retirement dates up to the new retirement dates the law allowed. The natural leveller was always going to be the ability to maintain a medical certificate as it always had been and as it is now. Far from being a wave of pilots that retired at 55, and then 60 and later 65, the medical Standard has always smoothed out the curve such that the wave is more of a ripple than a tsunami by the time it reaches the compulsory buffer.
I have seen pilots happy to retire early, or at the date their occupational pensions first allowed, or as late as the current legislation allowed. I have also seen a lot who were medically forced to retire early. Whatever the case, it should always be their choice. Inevitably, this same demographic comprises the most experienced pilots in the industry. These pilots therefore have a value and should be encouraged and rewarded to stay on.
Exuberance of youth will always want everybody ahead of them to get out of the way in their anxiety to achieve the pots of gold that they perceive they are being blocked from. I was the same, and watched as those at the top of the seniority list glacially clung on as long as they could. The closer you get to that pinnacle, the more you will have experienced the reasons why people want to continue.
Whilst it is true that those drawing a pension can maintain a standard of living on today’s levels of reduced remuneration to a greater or lesser extent, it is not true that those pilots are causal to that reduced remuneration. When the lo-co revolution started to take hold in the “nineties” the levels of command pay remained fairly consistent. It was the legislative changes to FCL requirements that brought hoards of youngsters with 250 hours (previously 700 hours) clamouring for a licence and the right seat of a jet. The laws of supply and demand coupled with a healthy dose of business acumen, opportunity and greed, brought the T&C’s at the entry level crashing down. It was only a matter of time for that to make its way further up the tree, and “hey presto” it arrived!
You can remove the age limitation for pilots (and sooner or later they will) and the medical standard will then be the sole attrition tool.