People with very few principles are hiding behind high-minded ones to try and shove this change down the throats of the large majority who do not want it. Let’s make one thing perfectly clear it is about the money, it always is!
You can read the arguments pro and con on this issue, and they both have merits, and they have been exhaustively made in many different threads. It is always the guys approaching 60 who are arguing they are too good to be lost to this industry (they are not) and the younger ones making the argument that it slows their progressing (a temporary situation at most). There are variations but they don’t stray too far from these two basic ones.
To me the issue will solve itself in the next decade, but I want to make the price higher for the old ones, when the change comes. They operated under the system as is; where everyone cleared out at 60. They were able use the advantages of this system, but are balking when it comes time to pay the price. They signed a contract with their current employer in which it is totally clear that they too clear out of the left seat at age 60. So when that day comes I would like to see these people honor their contract and (be forced) to retire from their current airline. Only new hires will have the date of their retirement age moved to 65. If the oldies want to continue to fly they can fly past the age of 60 but they will have to do so at another outfit.
As far as LHR rain not being able to show any empathy or an emotion like that. He is not the most diplomatic person I agree, but he just opposes any change in the retirement age, and wants people to stop whining (at least that is what I read between the lines). Empathy or sympathy should be reserved for the people who lost their homes in New Orleans, or the folks starving in Niger right now, not for an airline pilot approaching his retirement age. You can find sympathy right between **** and syphilis in the dictionary. I am a wide-body Captain and I will honor my contract, and if I want to fly past my retirement age here in Europe I will be able to, but not at my airline. And this is as it should be.
Gr. O.