Pilot life spans
 

While browsing through old company magazines from the 80s and 90s prior to a clean out, I was struck by the number of old colleagues then dying in their 60s and 70s whereas nowadays many seem to be surviving into their 90s.
Are there any statistics to confirm a change?

Was it a function of the stress undergone by the wartime generation, a career spent in smoke-filled cockpits, the stress imposed by old fashioned training and checking techniques - or all of the above?

Pilots have had an above average life expectancy since people looked into it in the 1960s. I suspect because you dont invest in the career if you have poor health, and it is in your own interest to remain healthy rather than due to having regular medicals.

Our generation has seen the greatest ever improvement in life expectancy with the exception of recoveries after wars and pandemics and your observations are in line with that increase. Mostly due to better diet, less pollution, less smoking etc followed by vaccination programmes and a little bit from improvements in medicine

Under the glass top of a coffee table in the waiting room of the Praed St aviation HQ prior to the Borge cube, there were photos of sliced pilot's brains. Smoking drinking or non-drinking.

The drinking ones had shrunken black-lined crinkly bits, whereas the healthy chaps had fresh cauliflower sections. Amazing to think either of those things once flew aircraft.

Alright. Enjoy your coffee. :8

How revolting 😝

What, my English grammar? I'm fairly sure they're not allowed to slice pilots anymore.

In the same building, there was a huge iron-framed puffer machine. It had a horizontal turntable with disposable paper log. Like Decca, they'd stopped wasting the paper years before.

I gave it my best shot. The guy memorising the reading called someone else, and they bid me have another go. I ended up with a crowd - of about four.
I'm not terribly bright, but after about four goes, with them all kind of cheering me on, they were trying to see if I could blow the needle off the dial. I couldn't. Every reading was almost exactly just shy of the edge. It seems I would have been a record-breaker. Which is only worth mentioning because I had been a weezy, sneezy, coughing, excused-of-all-sports, science nerd. I had taken up judo when it was a very new sport and was transformed.

Funny what can happen when you really want to do things.