Age Shall not Weary Them

Up until now, in the US pilots are required to retire at age 60, and opponents of this policy say that nobody has been able to prove that a decline in ability occurs at that age. The Stanford/VA Aging Clinical Research Center in Palo Alto, California has turned up some interesting conclusions from a study of aging and ancient pilots. Dr. Joy L. Taylor says that highly skilled pilots have built up and built-in expertise that can offset the loss of certain skills that comes with the aging process. She compared them with expert chess players and generationally challenged musicians.

Taylor and her team looked at 118 pilots ranging in age from 40 to 69, following them for three years and assessing any decline in psychomotor skills and cognitive aspects of their profession. She thinks that she's proved that older pilots actually show less decline in their aviation skills over time than their younger peers.

Taylor divided her guinea pigs into three levels of expertise based on their Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rating. Each group was tested annually for air-traffic controller communications, traffic avoidance, scanning instruments, approach to landing, and summary flight score. Expert and experienced pilots scored highest on tests of flight performance, and showed the least decline in their skills over time. Their performance was particularly strong in communication and an adept approach to landing. Level of expertise was more strongly associated with a pilot's skills than the amount of time spent flying each year.

On the subject of age per se, older pilots initially performed worse at learning new skills than their younger colleagues, but their skill retention scores showed a slower decline over time. This was primarily because the senior pilots showed more improvement in their traffic avoidance abilities. Some would say that with age comes cunning and mistrust.

"These findings show the advantageous effect of prior experience and specialized expertise on older adults' skilled cognitive performances," Taylor states in a press release accompanying the study. "Our discovery has broader implications beyond aviation to the general issue of aging in the workplace and the objective assessment of competency in older workers."

In that 27 Feb Neurology Journal, two editorials argue that the age of fixed age limits for the workplace is past its sell by date. They advocate a transition to competency based evaluations of performance. Without that embedded and underlying philosophy, any age discrimination laws could soon become out-dated.