US: Air passengers should feel quite safe with a pilot who is getting on in years, a new study suggests. Older pilots actually show less decline in their aviation skills over time than do younger ones.
In the US, pilots are required to retire at 60. Opponents of this policy say that nobody has been able to prove that a decline in ability occurs at that age.
Like expert chess players and musicians, say Dr Joy L. Taylor and colleagues, highly-skilled pilots have built up expertise which can offset the loss of certain skills that comes with ageing. Their findings have implications for understanding the competence of all older workers, they add.
Dr Taylor and her team studied 118 pilots ranging from 40 to 69 who were divided into three levels of expertise based on their Federal Aviation Administration rating.
The pilots were tested annually for air-traffic control communications, traffic avoidance, scanning instruments, approach to landing and summary flight score. Older pilots initially performed worse than their younger colleagues, but their scores showed a slower decline over time. This was primarily because the senior pilots showed more improvement in their traffic avoidance abilities.
"These findings show the advantageous effect of prior experience and specialised expertise on older adults' skilled cognitive performances," Dr Taylor states. "Our discovery has broader implications beyond aviation to the general issue of ageing in the workplace and the objective assessment of competency in older workers."
Two editorial writers in the journal Neurology, which published the study, argue against fixed age limits for the workplace and suggest that this might also apply to other skilled professionals such as surgeons.