Find it all interesting - if you learn and qualify in your forties and are lucky enough to get turbine experience and you look at it from an employees perspective I can never understand why it seems that young guys are the preference because of what you will get out of them ??? I have noticed that the younger set dont seem to hang around in their so-called long term careers for very long - they are all using the Operators in the same way they are being used
If you are fit and reliable and usually have skills that the operators can use while you sit around waiting for IMC to go away I dont see why they dont go for older people. I think the key is its not easy as the other posters have implied and the risk of failure could be an unrecoverable debt. One of my instructors had done that type of work and he described it to me - landing at night in the rain in close to gale force winds with machines full of family bread winners - wasnt for him, not as glamorous as it looks. One bit of advice is once you have trained/flown for 20 hrs you will know if you can do it as a career or not.