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ALPA-FAA DISPUTE (Cont.)

Jennings Randolph (D- W. Va.). Latimer and Rogers were with Eastern Airlines and Outland with Delta Air Lines prior to their retirement last month at age 60. These two were among several pilots who testified or submitted statements at the Senate hearing.
They appeared before the Senate subcommittee on Dec. 19, just 10 days before the complaint was filed in D.C. district court. F. Lee Bailey, who has battled FAA over air traffic controller working conditions, is one of the pilot's attorneys.
At the Senate hearing, EAL Capt. Robert L. Tully, representing ALPA's committee on discrimination in pilot employment in place of Capt. G.D. Goss of Frontier, cited the second medical study to back the pilots' viewpoint. In an ALPA-funded project at the Aviation Medicine Research Lab, Ohio State University, researchers concluded last year that a pilot at age 55 and over was substantially less likely to be suddenly incapacitated than those between the ages of 40and55. FAA officials said they were aware of the Ohio study, but wouldn't comment until a final report had been issued.
Capt. Tully in a prepared statement referred to FAA's own study of pilot aging at Georgetown University's Clinical Research Institute, stating that it "ended inconclusively." The study, said an FAA official, was designed to delve into new techniques to detect disease in airmen and to set up ratings for pilots to separate their chronological age from their physiological age.
FAA officials explain the Georgetown effort was inconclusive due to "deficiencies in the basic design of the study. If it were to be restructured, it would take 10 to 15 years to get usuable results." In fact, FAA spokesmen even question "the concept of being able to set up such a study."
Dr. Proper, a witness at the Randolph hearing, said the Federal Air Surgeon had sent a committee of his own to examine the work being done at Lovelace, but they questioned the use of pilot volunteers as being representative of the overall pilot population. FAA concluded that the Lovelace investigators had no evidence available to change the age-60 rule, according to Dr. Proper. If there is criticism of our methods, he stated, then DOT could set up a research effort to compare "our population, say, to a random sample selection of pilots, and whether there were in fact any differences."
For years now ALPA has tried to get FAA to at least open up the issue of retire-at-60 in a hearing. The agency has always declined, apparently because its position on the medical evidence is unchanged.
"We believe that the age-60 rule should not stand or fall on the basis of hard evidence and that the only approach to this problem consistent with candor and fair play is to air out all the evidence under circumstances of procedural fairness," Capt. Tully told the Randolph subcommittee.
The pilots publicly have yet to state their views on an acceptable cut-off age for flying airline transports.
Some say privately, however, that age 65, normal retirement age for other groups of workers, is acceptable. The pilots do not come under the Age Discrimination in Employment act of 1967 since age is considered by the government as a bona fide occupational qualification for flying airline aircraft for safety of the public.
One unanswered question in the debate so far is why FAA refuses to allow over-60 airline pilots fly airline transports, but lets over-60 private pilots fly in the same federal airspace? When asked this question, FAA sources state the airline pilots have more responsibility and must adhere to stricter standards. The same differences hold for the number of flying hours to qualify for a private flier's and air transport pilot's license.
Air carriers accepting delivery of the 747 transport are handling the pilot transitioning problem with ALPA through their labor contracts. Most contracts dealing with the 747 will have so-called "by-pass provisions" wherein a pilot age 58 will not retrain for a jumbo jet, said an ALPA spokesman. Instead, he will draw 747 captain's pay for two years and then retire under the FAA rule.
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