It's about age discrimination, stupid!
Never mind if one is rich or poor, still happily married after 30 years or three times divorced, fat or skinny, black or white, straight or gay... or in this case, young or old, my quarrel is with a discriminatory practice (forced retirement at 60 for pilots) that is out of step with today's 'best practice.'
I would like to see a level playing field where the retirement age is either raised to the more usual 65 years that applies to 'most people' or else replaced by 'on condition'. If you strip away all the overheated rhetoric about promotion to command, the state of the airlines' pension funds, etcera, etc., this is the core issue and the argument against it is that it is discrimination in the negative sense of the word (not some 'bus driver' squeezing avocados in Sainsbury's), something generally considered to be a 'bad thing'.
Here it is somehow acceptable for a variety of reasons which just do not stand up to examination. It is not such a central issue as, say, civil rights for 'negroes' was, but there too was a case where it simply suited various powerful interests to ignore a case of injustice. Every so often it comes up, such as when the hero of that DC-10 crash was forced to retire just months after proving himself a really exceptional airman, but then it fades from view again. Well, it's just greedy old pilots who should all be rich anyway. And some of you guys support such a childish approach to this issue?