The notion that younger people will always tend to pick up skills quicker is not necessarily true in my opinion. Where I work in another industry we have ab-initio fifty year olds out performing people in their twenties and thirties. Quite a few of the older folk have a phenomenal attitude to work and this more than carries them through. I really feel that the airlines are missing out here. In the 30s-50s age range you can find ex-NCOs, ex-emergency services and all sorts of other people with tremendous amounts of life experience doing sfaety-critical stuff.
Also, in my line of work we have very thorough aptitude tests which you can only fail once in your life, fail twice and you cannot apply again. Historically the failure rate in these tests was approximately 90%. That is another thing the airline world could learn from I think. It's not fail-safe but it would be a good start.
Last edited by Chris the Robot; 17th Mar 2018 at 10:17.