LD Max
I do apologize for the tone of my post, written while under the influence of half a dozen Fosters last night, I am excessively prone to hyperbole and wild exaggeration with most of the things I say and do but generally I'm on the side of the good guys honest
However I have to say it doesn't matter what your opinion or indeed my opinion is of the trainability and/or desirability of the older wannabe - my point was that these schemes are wildly desirable and snowed under with applications from all walks of life, to the point where they have to put you all through batteries of brutally hard and basically unpassable tests just to weed out 99% of you to get the numbers down to manageable levels, before they even start looking seriously at individuals. Ergo, you can't force any airline to sponsor anyone they don't want to sponsor, on the grounds of ageism or sexism or anything else.
At the end of the day how are you, and the 999 out of 1000 other unsuccessful applicants, going to prove that the one guy who was successful got there because of 'age discrimination' against all the rest of you? For a start all they have to do is just turn round and say well he scored higher in the psychological profile than you - and no we can't show you his psychological profile because that's infringing on HIS rights under the human rights act. * Oh and by the way 'the other guy' is used in this context for simplicity of grammar alone and in no way signifies a sexist bias in my ppruning
*
In fact I can't prove it but it's just a hunch based on many years of instructing, but I would bet that the young ones DO score higher on average in these tests than the older ones.
Anyway it's all just people running their mouths off on the internet, none of it matters to the people that do the hiring and firing. I would place money on the fact that we will see the end of sponsorship schemes in general before we see them open up to over-35-year-olds, EU legislation or no.
<<edit: Nice post, Luke. Wish there were more like this on PPruNe.>>