SWAjet

Did you know that the Cessna 150 that created the scramble on Capitol Hill and the White House by flying within 3 NM of the White house, turns out the instructor pilot on board was over 60 years old and so feeble that his student had to take over! I kid you not.

"Sheaffer, 69, froze when a Black Hawk helicopter appeared near his right wing as he was flying toward the White House and had a hard time handling his small aircraft, officials told The Washington Post. Troy Martin, 36, who had logged only 30 hours of flight time, took over the controls and landed the plane at an airport in Frederick, Md., the paper reported Saturday. "

av8r4aa

Age 60 is a rule to PROTECT THE PASSENGERS AND THE CO-PILOT.

Might as well have a drunk up front.
He would say "I don't know what happened"...... "It happened so fast"
"I thought everything looked okay"

RIIIIIIGHT pops TIME TO HANG UP THE WINGS!

HalinTexas

I'm OK to retire at 60, but the government and the industry better make it feasible for me to retire at that age, through retirement plans, SS and Medicare bennies.

cactusmike

Come on, now. Are you equating a 69 year old private pilot with an ATP that has to pass 2 medicals with EKGs , 2 checkrides, a line check and every other test that comes along? Give me a break. If you see an increase in the age 60 rule you will see medical standards raised as well, up to JCAB or JAA standards.

Methow

Last post listed a bunch of medical hoops ATP's must jump through. The insinuation is that if the age was extended, more thorough physical and cognitive testing would be required not only of pilots over age 60, but those under as well. It would raise the bar physically and mentally. I'm not so sure that is a good thing. Once the government gets involved with setting new standards, stand by for things you may not want to see.

Alaska737

The latest from the the ALPA Exec Board going right now on how the ALPA wide survey results turned out. Kinda sad that only 38% participated in the poll.
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The May 2005 Executive Board meeting convened this morning, and the first agenda item following the national officers' presentations was the report on the results of the Age 60 Rule education campaign and poll.

The polling was conducted in conjunction with the Wilson Center for Public Research who helped to develop the survey questions and analyze the results.

The Age 60 web survey opened on April 4, 2005 and was available online through April 29, 2005. All U.S. and Canadian members in good standing were eligible to participate in the survey.

Overall, nearly 38% of eligible members participated in the web survey. In addition to the web survey, traditional telephone polling augmented the web survey to ensure an accurate demographic representation of the membership.

Taken together, the telephone poll data and the two sets of demographically stratified web survey data provide extremely accurate results, with a raw sample margin of error of less than 1% and less than 0.5% with sample stratification.

The results from all data sets were very similar. In response to the question, "Do you favor changing the FAA Age 60 Rule," in the phone poll, 39% said yes to a change, 54% answered no to changing the rule.

For the largest demographically stratified cross-section of 6,559 records from the web survey, 42% said yes to a change, and 56% said no to changing the rule.

For the second cross-section of 1,045 stratified and coded responses, 41% said yes and 56% said no. And for the entire unadjusted set of 19,012 web responses 44% said yes and 55% said no.