Agincourt,
I'm one of those who totally support Ian. I started military flying at age 20 and commercial flying at age 30. I've been at it for 42 years and I wish to continue for many reasons: I still love what I'm doing and somehow, despite being an old git, seem able to pass OPCs and sim rides on 2 types; being another of aviation's divorce casualties, I need to keep working for financial reasons (gone are the days of imagining my retirement at age 58 in a rural French idyll
); I fundamentally disagree with decisions made arbitrarily on the basis of age, with no account being taken of the physical and mental health of the individual - after all, it's not as if each of us has the same fixed time to walk this earth and suddenly at a government-decreed age we pop our clogs (though with our present Nanny state and the parlous condition of the state pension scheme, maybe they'd like to build a nice little people-reprocessing plant at Soylent Green
).