thanks for the replies folks...
i'm pretty certain that there is a
huge problem with age discrimination in the industry. and the biggest trouble is, it is not easy for even the 'nicest' of recruiting teams to appreciate just how discriminatory they are being; they are simply 'educated' into their discriminatory attitude because we live in an ageist society and their employers do nothing to challenge it. if we didn't have this ageism, the cosmetics industry would be finished!
the other problem, as i see it, is that operators prefer younger pilots because they probably come with less 'baggage' (opinions basically) than older ones. i mean, why recruit an opinionated pilot if you can recruit a more malleable one?
there are numerous threads on pprune containing assertations about how the brain atrophies with age, but the fact is that no conclusive scientific evidence exists anywhere on the matter. the furthest the Caa appear to want to go is to say that the present age limits are going to stay the same in light of age discriminaton legislation.
http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/43/Age%20D...egislation.pdf
as Greg points out above, if a 45 year old holds a cpl/ir, then that should be good enough for the operator, period. otherwise, what is the point of taking the cpl/ir tests? (or a 55 year old, or a 25 year old for that matter)
in much the same way that the Metropolitan Police being accused of institutional racism didn't make every officer a racist, the aviation industry has an inbuilt ageism that even the most open minded of recruiters are blindly going along with but it doesn't make them 'nasty' people, just people with a blind spot.
if one can be a pilot of, say, 50 years and still convert a 757 rating to an a320, as many do in the UK right now, then surely his/her brain is no less capable than the newbie/wannabee of 50 years attempting to get into the industry for the first time. if you agree wth that logic, then you have to concede that denying the 50 yr old wannabee a chance at interview IS ageist, unfair and illegal...not to mention a huge waste of talent.