So, what’s new in Congress? Today, elderly pilots

Have you been curious about what Congress is doing on aviation? Yeah, me too, and the answer is: a whole lot of not much. Remember when I wrote about those five-year FAA reauthorization bills this summer (House, Senate)? The House passed its bill by a solid margin. That battle royale I predicted in conference? Well, the Senate never got around to passing its own version or considering the House’s. In lieu of actually doing their jobs, on September 26 Congress passed a stopgap funding measure for the entire government pending passage of appropriations bills.

But there has been some action on a measure contained in both FAA bills and brought up on its own by Congressmen Jim Oberstar, Jerry Costello, Robin Hayes, and John Mica: raising the mandatory pilot retirement age from sixty to sixty-five. The Fair Treatment for Experienced Pilots Act (HR 4343) is hardly unexpected; age sixty-five is an international standard and the FAA was already moving in that direction. With the support of labor and no objection from industry, the bill sailed through unanimously.

What will the new retirement age mean for airlines and pilots? Here are a few issues:

• The Air Line Pilots Association’s support masks a debate among the pilot community. Many pilots see it as an opportunity to extend their earning years at the top of the pay scale, but there is a substantial minority who feel mistreated by their airlines, especially those that jettisoned their pension programs in bankruptcy. The skeptics may work at airlines where morale has plummeted.
• More importantly, most airlines pay into retirement funds for their employees called “B-funds,” defined-contribution plans in which the employee owns the money. Even if they offered defined-benefit plans, many once-bankrupt airlines have defaulted on them, leaving only the B-fund and employee-based retirement fund. The B-fund contribution, a percentage of income, is contractually mandated and because until now pilots have had forced retirements, airlines cannot escape paying it. But now that the pilot retirement age is keyed to national entitlement program retirement ages, airlines can argue that the B-fund is no longer necessary. Even though HR 4343 (section 1[f]) requires airlines to negotiate new retirement plans, a ruling from a federal regulatory agency could speed up the process for the airlines.
• Section 1(c) applies the ICAO standard to international flights. ICAO calls for having an under-sixty pilot on the crew deck with any over-sixty pilot. Since flights are assigned by seniority, in some cases senior crew members may be bumped for less senior pilots in order to meet the age rule. This messes up hard-fought seniority lists and may pose a threat of an age-discrimination lawsuit. Regardless, the divergence will make pilot schedulers’ work much more difficult.

So Congress can act on aviation after all. It will be interesting to see how the retirement age issue plays out.

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