President Bush raises Airline Pilot retirement age to 65

On Thursday morning, Frank Walters of Keller started what could have been his last day as an American Airlines Inc. pilot.

Instead, on Thursday evening, President Bush extended Mr. Walters’ career – and potentially those of thousands of other airline pilots – by five more years.

For nearly half a century, the federal government required commercial airline pilots to retire when they reached age 60, as Mr. Walters did on Thursday. But a law passed this week by Congress and signed Thursday by the president extends that mandatory retirement date to age 65.

Mr. Walters already had his mind made up – he’s going to keep flying.

“I’d been waiting for the legislation to pass,” Mr. Walters said Friday. “I just didn’t know when.”

Had the president waited until Friday to sign the bill, Mr. Walters would have been forced to retire as of Thursday or apply as a new pilot at American – the law doesn’t apply to anyone who reached age 60 and retired before enactment.

Asked if he had been waiting on pins and needles, Mr. Walters answered fatalistically: “Well, it was going be when it was going to be.”

The bill affects the airline industry far beyond pilots’ ability to add five years to their career. Flying assignments, training dates, hiring plans and anticipated promotions have been built for decades on the assumption that when pilots on the payroll hit 60, they’d be out the door.

The Southwest Airlines Pilots’ Association and some other pilot groups had been lobbying Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration to raise the retirement age.

The movement gained backing when the International Civil Aviation Organization changed its rules in November 2006 to allow pilots to continue flying to age 65. That created the situation where older pilots on foreign-flagged carriers could fly aircraft into the United States, while older pilots with U.S.-based airlines were banned.

Critics had raised safety concerns regarding older pilots, but airline officials said all pilots go through stringent testing to prove their ability to be safe, and that won’t change.

“Safe means safe,” Southwest chief executive Gary Kelly said. Age alone shouldn’t disqualify anyone, he said.

The change could reduce the estimated 100 pilots that Southwest must replace each year due to retirements.

Negotiators for American and its Allied Pilots Association will meet next week to discuss the potential impact of pilots staying up to five years longer.

“We’re trying to figure what the issues are, understand what the scheduling implications are, what the pension implications are, what the operational implications are,” American spokeswoman Sue Gordon said. “It’s really too soon to know right now. “

As of Friday afternoon, American officials had contacted six pilots out of the 11 set to turn 60 by the end of the year; four said they intended to keep flying.

One who will not is Richard Metts of Albuquerque, N.M., who flies Boeing 777s out of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Mr. Metts was preparing Friday afternoon to command a flight to Tokyo, with his last trip scheduled Sunday on the return flight to Chicago.

Mr. Metts, whose 60th birthday is Dec. 21, could have extended his career. He has chosen to retire.

“I did have second thoughts,” Mr. Metts said from American’s operations offices at O’Hare. “I did a thorough analysis of my financial situation and also my family and personal situation and decided I still wanted to go ahead and retire.”

One factor was that Congress changed the rules so close to his birthday. “If it had happened six months, a year earlier, I might have made a different decision,” he said.

Sweating it out

Southwest Airlines Co. pilot Bill Schwetke was clicking his heels Friday. He turns 60 on Jan. 1, and the new law means he’ll keep flying to age 65, he said.

“I love to fly, and I work for a great company,” he said. “I got a job that I just don’t want to give up, and I’m pleased to keep it.”

Mr. Schwetke, a Northern Virginia resident who flies out of Baltimore, had regularly visited Capitol Hill to lobby for the change. He admitted sweating it out as he watched his birthday approach.

“I was not sure it would happen soon enough for me,” said Mr. Schwetke, a Denison native who joined Southwest in 1996. But he had a fallback plan.

“If it had been signed on Jan. 2,” he said, “on Jan. 2 I would have submitted my application to Southwest Airlines to come back as a new hire.”

Too late for some

Ex-pilots David Fisser and Richard Hyslop can only watch the action and consider that it came too late for them.

Mr. Fisser, a Lewisville resident who flew 26 years for Southwest, waited all this year for Congress to change the retirement age. On Nov. 8, he quit waiting – that was his 60th birthday, and Mr. Fisser was forced to leave Southwest.

He admits being a little bitter that it took so long to get the law changed. He passed his medical exam a month before retirement and passed a proficiency check 10 days before he retired.

“I don’t know if I would have actually flown to age 65,” Mr. Fisser said. “But, you know, I would have liked to have the option to. That’s the main issue. There were other people that were keeping us” from having that option.

He criticized the APA and the Air Line Pilots Association, the largest U.S. pilot union, for their opposition to raising the retirement age. ALPA finally backed off its support of age 60 this year.

“Their word was taken as gospel, but I think they had other motives,” Mr. Fisser said. “The rest of us were just trying to hold down a job, make a living, pay taxes and provide for a lot of things that may happen between now and age 90 or whenever we assume room temperature.”

Mr. Hyslop worked 29 years for American before he reached age 60 on Aug. 28. He’s grateful for his career at American and is glad that the carrier protected his pension, as opposed to other major carriers that reduced pensions or turned them over to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.

But the Carrollton resident had long thought the age 60 retirement requirement was unfair and wishes the new law had been passed before he retired.

“I guess I’m philosophical about it,” he said. “Would I have kept working? I probably would have. I sure would have liked the chance.”

The law specifically states that the new retirement age is not retroactive. Even though that language hurts him and other recent retirees, Mr. Fisser said the law is fair. Otherwise, pilots returning to an airline would bump other pilots who had just been hired, he said.

“It’s unfortunate for us, but I don’t know how you would have taken people back,” he said.

Effect on the young

An issue that airlines and pilot leaders have worried about is how a later retirement date would hurt the careers of younger pilots, who had counted on improving their pay as they moved up to bigger airplanes or from first officer to captain and were ready to bid for better trips, vacations and days off. The longer careers for the oldest pilots mean more time with lower seniority for the younger ones.

Mr. Metts, the American pilot, said he believes that most pilots who make it to age 60 will keep on flying beyond that date and that most people will accept the change.

“I think it’ll take a few months for it to become the new standard, and then I think everybody will be OK with it – for the most part,” he said.

Source:The Dallas news