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to defend the Rule, and its resulting limitation on the careers of airline pilots, with all the resources at its disposal.
There are several reasons why it was particularly timely in 1968 for this Committee to trigger a full reexamination of the entire subject of compulsory retirement for airline pilots. First, there had been, since 1959, a continuing undercurrent of resentment at the concept that the FAA Administrator had apparently unlimited power to issue regulations drastically affecting the careers of airline pilots, with apparently no supervision by the Courts against the possible abuse of that power. There are those who believe that a logical extention of the same power exercised by the Administrator in 1959 on the basis of a pilot's age might result in other equally arbitrary conditions to be satisfied by a pilot who desired to continue flying. That possibility raised a real and impending threat to each and every one of us.
Next, we knew that the matter of a pilot's age was likely to assume new significance with the advent of such advanced aircraft types as the Boeing 747, [[right margin]] L1011 [[/right margin]] the DC-10, and ultimately, the SST. We were deeply concerned at reports that air carriers, persuaded by economic considerations, seriously planned to assert that there should be a chronological age limitation applied to a pilot's exercise of his seniority to transition to such new aircraft types, on the theory that the pilot training costs associated with the introduction of such new airplane types would have to be offset by limiting transition to pilots young enough so that these costs could be [[strikethrough]] [[/strikethrough]] recovered through amortization over the balance of his career. This then represented a direct attack on fundamental principles of seniority for each and every pilot represented by the Association. We were concerned that the continued existence of the FAA's compulsory retirement age would give the carriers a leg up in attempting to establish a maximum transition age, and therefore, that this was another good reason for our assault on the underlying FAA compulsory retirement regulation.