Current and retired airline pilots filed suit Thursday in San Francisco demanding an immediate change to the federal requirement that those flying commercial aircraft retire by age 60.
About 125 pilots sued the Federal Aviation Administration in U.S. District Court, naming agency director Marion Blakey and two former officials as defendants. The plaintiffs ask that the age-60 rule be jettisoned and request an unspecified amount of monetary damages for pilots who wanted to fly past age 60 but lost income due to the mandatory retirement rule.
The FAA is considering easing the rule, but no change could occur under the agency's plan for at least a year and a half. The agency declined to comment on the suit.
The FAA rule has been in place since 1959, when it was instituted as a safety measure designed to offset the supposed declining skills of aging pilots. However, many pilots insist there is no medical basis for the age-60 rule, citing improved training, more-sophisticated aviation technology and the better health of today's aircraft crews compared with their predecessors.
Most nations, in accordance with International Civil Aviation Organization rules, allow one co-pilot up to age 65 on a commercial flight as long as co-pilots on that flight are under 60.
The more-restrictive U.S. rule is backed by some pilots. The Air Line Pilots Association and the Allied Pilots Association, major unions for this country's commercial airline pilots, say they support the current age-60 rule on safety grounds.
In January, Blakey proposed revising the U.S. rule to bring it in line with the international standard. On Feb. 2, the FAA said it plans to file a formal notice of proposed rule making by the end of 2007, then allow an 18-month period for public comment. If the agency does revise the retirement rule, the change would thus take effect in 2008 at the earliest.
That's too late for the disgruntled pilots, who charge that keeping the age-60 rule in place violates their Fifth Amendment right to due process and costs them the wages they would be paid if they could keep flying while the FAA thinks things over.
On the FAA's Web site, , the agency states it will not make any rules-change retroactive to cover retired pilots, nor will it grant exemptions or waivers to pilots who turn 60 while the agency is weighing a rules change.
The lawsuit's lead plaintiff is Michael Oksner, a retired Southwest Airlines pilot, with San Francisco attorneys Tony Bothwell and Rey Hassan representing the pilots.
Copyright 2005 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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