747 Downwind I admire and support your campaign against political correctness, but I'd like to correct a couple of your contentions:
Are we going to sue BA because they only recruit Intergrated approved students and not Modular.
BA don't take only integrated graduates. They take pilots from a variety of backgrounds.
There is an ideology that older pilots (irrespective of experience) are harder to train and that younger pilots are more able and willing to adapt to change. This of course is an unfair stereotype and thus discrimination.. like saying generally women are not good at reading maps and therefore should not fly, ridiculous stereotypes that hold no substance.
Actually, both of these 'stereotypes' have a considerable basis in fact. Over many, many years, the RAF (among others) have shown on several occasions that, in general, older people are less successful at assimilating complex training than younger people. Experience can completely offset this disadvantage, however. As for the stereotype that 'women [are] not good at reading maps', this is beased on the fact that - in general - women are less spatially aware than men. This is not wishful thinking, nor an unfounded misogynist remark; it is fact. You are quite correct when you state that we should assess the individual rather than the generalisation. However, you should not be surprised when observation reveals that the generalisations are born out by experience!
Your final point about progression to command echoes something I said in an earlier post, and is quite correct. What cut-off age an airline applies will vary with the experience of the applicant and foreknowledge of upcoming legislation, combined with the expected time to command. For instance, in BA the expected time to command is 12 to 15 years, which would support your age 40 cut-off. However, the retirement age will increase from 55 to 60 next year, which means that a cut-off of around 45 is sensible (in fact it's 47, I believe). Because of the rather long time to command, and the availability of excellent short-haul training sectors, BA are happy to recruit ab-initio pilots - and imply that they will recruit older pilots with limited hours because (my interpretation) they believe their selection procedures will weed out those who won't make it. Other, smaller, airlines can't afford such a detailed pre-employment assessment procedure and so, as they have lots and lots of applicants, will reject many on the basis of generalisations - including those that we have discussed. Is that discrimination? Or is it just coarse but sensible filtering?
Scroggs