Alarming images of a gaping hole in the side of the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 aircraft and multiple near-miss incidents on the nation’s runways remind us that flying—even in the U.S. air transportation system, which is the safest in the world—requires an enormous number of factors to go exactly right. Ensuring that everything does go right is what pilots train to do on every flight, as we perform our jobs in a complex system that is designed to mitigate uncertainty and risk. As members of Congress reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), they must resist special-interest pressure to needlessly inject uncertainty into air travel as record numbers of passengers return to the skies.
As our industry continues its strong recovery—one that aviation workers helped make possible—pilots have never been more committed to ensuring our airlines provide safe, reliable air transportation to America’s communities Pilots recognize that our industry’s success in ensuring the reliability of air travel relies on maintaining the gold standard that the United States has fought so hard to achieve.
As an example, the Air Line Pilots Association, Int’l (ALPA), along with more than 30 other labor unions, opposes any increase to the mandatory pilot retirement age in the United States, including a House-passed provision that would allow airline pilots between the ages of 65 and 67 to return to flying. Increasing the mandatory pilot retirement age beyond 65 would disrupt airline operations in the United States because pilots who are over the age of 65 would no longer be able to fly internationally.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the specialized U.N. agency that is charged with coordinating international air navigation, mandates that pilots in multicrew operations must retire at age 65. ICAO is neither considering nor tasked with considering a proposal to increase pilot retirement age. In addition, the FAA does not support a change. Given this, any proposal to increase the mandatory pilot retirement age in the United States would create significant uncertainty for airlines and their workers.
For example, the most senior airline pilots in the United States are frequently captains of widebody aircraft who fly on international routes. If the retirement age is increased, the change would require airlines to artificially “wall off” their operations just to accommodate this group of pilots between 65 and 67 years of age. Moreover, pilots who are over the age of 65 might be able to bid on flying that they could hold under their contract because of their seniority but that they could not legally perform. In these and other circumstances, increasing the retirement age could mean pilots receive pay for not flying.
Additionally, if pilots over the age of 65 are transitioned to smaller, narrowbody equipment to operate in the domestic market, the process for them to resume flying would require an extensive amount of time for them to retrain and become requalified on aircraft assigned to domestic routes. The situation would create a cascading—and costly—training backlog for airlines. This time-intensive process would be expensive for the airlines, displace pilots across the system, affect the seniority system on which pilot contracts are based, and cause shifts in pilot compensation that would have to be renegotiated by unions.
A proposal to increase pilot retirement age holds expensive, complicated, and arduous consequences for workers and the airline industry—the cost of which would no doubt be passed on to the flying and shipping public. In many cases, this harmful policy proposal presents problems that have not been anticipated by either management or pilot unions. As a result, such a change would inject uncertainty into airline operations at a time when the U.S. airline industry needs to focus every possible resource on meeting record-breaking demand.
Recently, we marked the anniversary of the US Airways Flight 1549 “Miracle on the Hudson,” another shining example of the incredible strength of the U.S. air transportation system—as well as the critical importance of having at least two highly trained pilots working on the flight deck. Given the recent examples of the industry’s tremendous success, Congress must stand firm against needlessly and arbitrarily injecting uncertainty that would compromise the U.S. air transportation system and cause Americans to pay more to travel and ship by air.
