The Inner Sanctum
President's Message

The FAA has published notice of our Petition for Exemptions in the Federal Register (FR). Their "Summary" section of the notice certainly does not summarize the Petition, nor does it give any hint of what is contained in the Petition, destroying all my lower schooling on what the word "Summary" means. This could be a fatal blow to Readers Digest. Their "Summary" is loaded with government double-speak which summarizes...nothing. They do state that the purpose of this publication is to improve the public's awareness of, and participation in, this aspect of FAA's regulatory activities. Certainly, everyone I know reads the Federal Register daily to keep abreast of the fast moving pace of regulatory change. Although it doesn't contain all the aspects of a bestseller, careful reading before bedtime promises to improve your sleep patterns.

Reading every word, you will notice near the bottom of this document (reprinted on page 2) a "Description of Relief Sought". Stating, for casual readers who may otherwise miss it,: "To permit ten petitioners to act as pilots in operations conducted under part 121 after reaching their 60th birthdays." That's it! Surely that increased the public awareness and will inspire them to participate in "this aspect of FAA's regulatory activities".

As part of our Petition, PPF had submitted a paragraph for publication in the Federal Register. Our statement (also reprinted on page 2) does not appear. Admittedly, the FAA did not take a biased position in their notice, and therefore, our statement would appeat slanted. The fact that their notice was not filed until 9/9/02, at 8:45AM, while our Petition was filed on June 13 gives rise to doubt the veracity of the FAA to respond within 120 days, as their regulation indicates.

Our lawyer, Tony Bothwell puts it thusly:
"When FAA put the notice of PPF's petition in the Federal Register on Sept. 10, it did not include the summary that we provided for the Federal Register. Apparently FAA wants to hide from Federal Register readers the basis for our petition, the fact that age 60 isn't a safety rule and that the agency has perpetrated the Big Lie for 40+ years. The agency's tactics are the kind of stuff one would have expected to find in the old Soviet Union, not here."

"We can publicly state that the FAA appears to have no intention of making a timely decision. Having public comment end a week or so before the exemptions are requested to go into effect means the agency is not allowing itself enough time to internalize the public comments and formulate its decision.
There does not appear to be any legal mechanism available to force FAA to render a timely decision.

Our petition was delivered to FAA on June 13 and requested that the exemptions go into effect in 120 days. If the decision comes long after October 13, it will not be a timely decision.

I assume you are encouraging your members and allies to send their "public comment" to FAA. "

Each of you should have received a first class letter by now requesting your participation in garnering as many comments to the docket as possible. This requires the efforts of each and every member. Instructions on how to submit comments electronically or by mail or were included. The results will be posted on the internet and I will be keeping track of how we stack up against ALPA and APA. Deadline for comments is 9/30/02. USPS and Internet addresses for the docket is in the F.R. notice. A simpler website for comments is www.age60rule.com.

Calls keep coming in from prospective members that have just gotten first word of our existence. How can this be? Don't you spread the word at your airline and others? Word of mouth is the only advertising we have. If you haven't been spreading the word, it's time to get started. It's staggering to think that we have been in existence since July, 1991, with members at so many airlines in the USA,and still we are, to a degree, unknown.

Get those comments to the docket flowing. With a little effort by each of you, we can overwhelm the FAA numbers.

Bert Yetman

The Federal Register
(Ed: From the Federal Register)
DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION
Federal Aviation Administration
[Summary Notice No. PE-2002-54]
Petitions for Exemption; Summary of Petitions Received
AGENCY: Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), DOT.
ACTION: Notice of petitions for exemption received.
-----------------------------------------------
SUMMARY: Pursuant to FAA's rulemaking provisions governing the application, processing, and disposition of petitions for exemption part 11 of Title 14, Code of Federal Regulations (14 CFR), this notice contains a summary of certain petitions seeking relief from specified requirements of 14 CFR. The purpose of this notice is to improve the public's awareness of, and participation in, this aspect of FAA's regulatory activities. Neither publication of this notice nor the inclusion or omission of information in the summary is intended to affect the legal status of any petition or its final disposition.

DATES: Comments on petitions received must identify the petition docket number involved and must be received on or before September 30, 2002.

ADDRESSES: Send comments on any petition to the Docket Management System, U.S. Department of Transportation, Room Plaza 401, 400 Seventh Street, SW., Washington, DC 20590-0001. You must identify the docket number FAA-2000-XXXX at the beginning of your comments. If you wish to receive confirmation that FAA received your comments, include a self-addressed, stamped postcard.
You may also submit comments through the Internet to http://dms.dot.gov. You may review the public docket containing the petition, any comments received, and any final disposition in person in the Dockets Office between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, except Federal holidays. The Dockets Office (telephone 1-800-647-5527) is on the plaza level of the NASSIF Building at the Department of
Transportation at the above address. Also, you may review public dockets on the Internet at http://dms.dot.gov.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Denise Emrick (202) 267-5174, Office of Rulemaking (ARM-1), Federal Aviation Administration, 800 Independence Avenue, SW., Washington, DC 20591.
This notice is published pursuant to 14 CFR 11.85 and 11.91.

Issued in Washington, DC., on September 5, 2002.
Donald P. Byrne,
Assistant Chief Counsel for Regulations.

Petitions for Exemption

Docket No.: FAA-2002-12501.
Petitioner: Mr. Anthony P. X. Bothwell, Attorney for ten petitioners.
Section of 14 CFR Affected: 14 CFR 121.383(c).
Description of Relief Sought: To permit ten petitioners to act as pilots in operations conducted under part 121 after reaching their 60th birthdays.

[FR Doc. 02-22944 Filed 9-9-02; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 4910-13-M

The foregoing is the FAA's notice of our Petition and request for public comments. The following is a paragraph copied directly from our Petition, in which PPF provided a statement for publication in the Federal Register. It was ignored.

Ten pilots around age 60 have requested exemption from the age 60 rule, 14 C.F.R. 121.383(c). These exemptions will not harm safety, because the rule has nothing to do with safety. FAA officials have misrepresented the rule's purpose and effect. The Administrator created the rule as a personal favor for an airline executive who had lost labor disputes over an airline retirement policy. The FAA rigidly has enforced the rule as a favor for airline executives who mistakenly believe that exemptions would impose undue cost and inconvenience. The FAA has obstructed discovery of relevant evidence. Thanks to "fail safe" procedures, pilot incapacitation (which in not age- related anyway) poses no threat to safety in multicrew air carrier operations. FAA has failed to consider the fact that regular pilot performance and medical checks prevent risk. Exemptions will remedy unreasonable discrimination that has no safety basis; help curb major airline recruiting of pilots needed by smaller airlines and the Armed Forces; and aid the war against international terrorism by enabling the most experienced, safe pilots available to be in command of civilian airliners at all times.

Some members do not have access to our website. For their benefit excerpts
from our Petition will appear in this and future newsletters.

(continued from Sept.) (footnotes excluded for space)

The panel said there was no medical reason "for singling out any other age below or above age 60" for mandatory pilot retirement. Dr. Robert N. Butler (who was Director of the NIA in 1979 when it was asked to evaluate the age 60 rule and in 1981 when the report was issued) recalled later, "Consulting experts to the NIA, the Institute of Medicine and other NIH scientists found no medical justification for the rule." He went on to say that the panel "suggested that the retirement at age 60 rule be waived on a limited basis to permit a medical study of older pilots... Unfortunately, the FAA did not accept our recommendation. As a result we continue to lose the expertise of seasoned pilots....".

What the NIA panel recommended was that the age 60 rule be continued for pilots in Part 121 flight operations and extended to Part 135 operations, but that a system of waivers allow pilots to continue to fly after reaching age 60 while FAA monitors and collects performance data. Years later it was revealed that the only reason why the NIA panel did not call for abolition of the age 60 rule was because panel members had been deceived by FAA officials' assurances that the FAA was going to start allowing waivers to let pilots fly beyond their sixtieth birthday. Dr. T. Franklin Williams, who succeeded Butler as Director of the National Institute on Aging, recalled later:

It was almost a year after the publication of the NIA Panel Report when the FAA announced that it was "considering developing and implementing a program" responsive to the NIA panel recommendations. Two years after that, however, the FAA withdrew the notice that it was considering such a program. The FAA notice of withdrawal alluded to economic factors ("retirement and insurance plans which conform to retirement at age 60") but asserted that safety was the reason for calling off the program that would have allowed waivers and monitoring of air carrier pilots beyond the sixtieth birthday. T.Franklin Williams later recalled that "in 1986...the Chief Flight Surgeon and other staff of the Federal Aviation Administration...gave no medical nor safety reasons for not going ahead, but indicated that operating staff of the Federal Aviation Administration were opposed." The fact that FAA officials misled NIA panel members is consistent with their other conduct. It appears that the agency never really considered the panel's conclusions and recommendations, and that FAA's stated reasons for abandoning the panel's suggestion amounted to disingenuous disinformation.

The National Institutes of Health repudiated more than 20 years of claims by FAA that medical reasons formed the basis for the age 60 rule. The NIH produced a major study that destroyed two decades of FAA's conclusory, straw-man medical arguments. And now, over 20 years have passed since the NIA Panel Report was published. The FAA has abandoned its discredited medical arguments for the age 60 rule. And yet, to the present day, FAA has failed to act in good faith on the findings and recommendations of the IOA study and the NIA panel.

In the more than two decades since the NIA Panel report was issued, evidence of the FAA's dereliction has continued to accumulate. In 1985, the medical director of TAP-Air Portugal evaluated more than 1,500 pilots at risk - both active and retired - from 1945 to 1983. After noting that the over-60 (retired) pilots had submitted to "the same medical, psychological, and psychomotor tests" as pre-retirement pilots, the study noted that "64% of the over [age] 60 examinees were absolutely fit for flight duties. In a 1994 study performed under contract to the FAA/CAMI , Dr. Robert Besco determined that "retired airline cockpit crews have a life expectancy of more than 5 years longer than the comparable general population. In 1988, Froom reported:

One year later, Jochanan Benbassat introduced the concept of a "decision analytic model" for the establishment of disqualification/waiver standards.

Whether for fighter pilots or airliner pilots, the balancing of risks model is an appropriate decision making tool. Its use confirms what already is well-known, that FAA's assertions about safety performance of older pilots are profoundly misleading.

If any of you know media personnel, now would be a good time to call their attention to our Petition. With the present administration prosecuting corporation executives for fraud in the investment market, how can they not compare to fraud within a government agency. The proof is there! This is not speculation. Its not smoke and mirrors. Its outright fraud! The Petition states the case, the Exhibits provide the proof.

The FAA has been engaged in trickery since 1959 in their dealings with the Age 60 Rule. From the very beginning, as shown by the Smith/Quesada letters, deception and lying has been the basis for retention of a Rule that was a favor to a friend, not a rule necessary for the safety of aviation in the United States, or the world. Economics drove C.R. Smith to call on "Pete" Quesada to initiate rulemaking designed to oust senior, higher paid pilots, and replace them with junior lower paid substitutes. How can our courts begin to say that what the FAA is doing to us is drastically different to what corporate CEO's are doing to stockholders. The FAA is curtailing our livelihoods, our careers...for one reason and one reason only...not to disturb the status quo. Everything they use against us is based on doctored reports, cooked studies and dissemination of misleading oral and written statements.

Printed below is a copy of an email showing how the world is "affected" by our rule.

Dear Capt. Bert Yetman:

Have been accompanying with great interest the struggle for such a worthy and just cause in which I am partly involved.

I will turn 60 in another 4 months, but provided I don't stick to wanting to keep on flying on international routes, there's no problem in Brazil. There is actually no age limit to fly on domestic routes, even as Captain on any aircraft category. It is only the physical that will withdraw a pilot from his career. However,
However, as I believe I already mentioned, VARIG took on to withdraw pilots older than 55.

Some are turning 60 this year and already went to Court (and were successful) to continue flying on International routes to countries which do not presently have the age 60 rule restriction.

It is our earnest hope that you guys in the States are successful in removing this stupid discriminatory rule, which we believe will pave the way for its subsequent removal from the ICAO Annex 1 and finally liberate the whole World from this plight.

Good news that TIME magazine may publish an article on the issue.

Best wishes. João Jacques Green


There you have it! In a nutshell, most of the world feels as the Brazilian pilots do. Last week a call came in from Germany. A retired Lufthansa pilot, whom I knew from our F-104 Starfighter days, called to ask about initiating charter flights from Frankfurt to Hawaii, wondering how to work within the FAA's Age 60 Rule.

Unfortunately, there wasn't any good news for him, as Captain. As a First Officer he would be legal to Fly into the USA (Honolulu) until age 65, but not as Pilot-In-Command. He explained that they could get individual exemptions to fly into France (still age 60), if requested through their government. Hoping for a similar arrangement with our government, he was disappointed with the answer I had to give.


Bert Yetman

Thanks to the personal effort of PPF member
Dan Hill, the following article appeared in Aviation Week.

AIR TRANSPORT

Pilots Renew Fight
Against Age-60 Rule

JOHN CROFT/WASHINGTON
The FAA has until October to approve or deny petitions from 10 pilots asking that they be exempted from forced retirement at age 60, a relic of rules the agency delivered in December 1959.

While scores of aviators have fought to overturn or get exempted from the "age-60" rule in various federal courts for more than 40 years - always unsuccessfully - the fate of these nine men and one woman may be different. While the group fully expects the next FAA administrator to deny their request, they say the lawsuit they plan to file afterward will expose a twisted tale of an ill-conceived regulation and four decades of creative fact manipulation to keep it in place.

"This time we're going for the jugular," said Bert Yetman, president of the Professional Pilots Federation, an organization created in 1991 solely for the purposes of eliminating or amending the rule. Funded by the federation, the pilots are being represented by attorney Anthony P.X. Bothwell, who prepared the 76-page exemption request that included hundreds more pages in letters and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Bothwell's tale is riveting and would seem credible, given this new information.

In short, the petition lays out how American Airlines pilots in 1959 were battling with management over contract conditions including an airline-imposed age-60 rule, wages and other issues. Unable to come to an agreement, pilots decided to strike for 21 days through the Christmas holidays. Mediators eventually ruled in favor of the pilots, after which American Chairman C.R. Smith reached out to his wartime friend and then - FAA Administrator Elwood Quesada.

"During the course of our recent negotiations with the pilot's association we found it unwilling to agree to the company's policy concerning retirement of air line pilots at age 60," Smith wrote to Quesada on Feb. 5, 1959. The letter concluded: "It may be necessary for the regulatory agency to fix some suitable age for retirement."

Ten months later, the FAA came out with a ruling setting 60 as the forced retirement age presumably based on medical arguments. One year later, Quesada retired from the FAA and was immediately elected to the American Airlines board of directors.
"What the FAA never has admitted publicly - and indeed has concealed from the courts, Congress and the citizenry for more than four decades - is that the age 60-rule was not initiated as a safety measure," Bothwell stated. "Nor was it crafted to avoid any medical risk."

Former FAA chief counsel Gregory Walden said if the rulemaking were indeed proved a "product of fraud," Yetman's pilots might have a chance at overturning it. However Walden was not sure that the rule's origin, no matter how sordid, would change the many court opinions - all favoring the FAA - that have trickled out since the 1960's.

Critics argue, however, that the medical data used to buoy the FAA's argument through the years are skewed. Robin Wilkening, Ph.D., analyzed the age-60 rule during her occupational medicine training at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health last year. "It is clearly age discrimination to my view," Wilkening said, pointing to numerous studies including what she called a "landmark evaluation" by the National Institutes of Health that found the age-60 rule is "indefensible on medical grounds."

"Study after study has shown that pilots are healthier and live longer," Wilkening said. Given the rigorous medical evaluations, check rides and simulator sessions that pilots undergo as often as every six months, Wilkening said airlines would quickly get an indication if a pilot were to become unfit, at any age.

Key Dismukes, chief scientist for human factors at NASA's Ames Research Center, said pilot performance versus age is largely a tradeoff between degradation of measurable sensory and cognitive functions and the gains provided by experience. "It differs between different people," Dismukes said, "and it would be very difficult to measure."
The FAA would not comment on the exemption request, as deliberations are ongoing.

AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/AUGUST 5, 2002

Some of our members do not have access to our website. For their benefit
excerpts will appear in this and future newsletters

The 1981 Report of the National Institute on Aging Proved, Once and for All, the Falsity of the Medical Arguments that the FAA, for More Than 20 Years, Had
Asserted as the Rationale for the Age 60 Rule.

As shown above, the FAA adopted and enforced the age 60 rule for secret economic reasons while falsely asserting that the reasons for the rule were of a medical nature. For more than two decades the agency refused to accept or acknowledge the growing body of evidence - produced on a worldwide basis - that there was no medical or other basis for the age 60 rule. Instead, the agency continued to use various medical arguments to defend its original justification for the rule. But in 1981 the nation's premiere scientific bodies investigated those claims, concluding unanimously that the FAA's medical arguments were meritless. After that, the FAA could no longer claim that there was ever any valid medical basis for the rule.

Congress in 1979 directed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct a study concerning mandatory age retirement for pilots. Pursuant to this mandate the NIH assigned the task to the Nations Institute on Aging (NIA), which awarded a contract to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), to provide an objective study regarding the medical questions related to the issue. The resulting IOM study was reviewed by an 18-member panel of experts assembled by the NIA. The NIA panel report made it irrefutably plain, as did the IOM study, that the FAA's 20 years of medical arguments in support of the age 60 rule were baseless. Both the IOM and the NIA panel called for allowing waivers to pilots who wanted to continue to fly beyond age fifty-nine. They recommended that the FAA grant exemptions to the age 60 rule and conduct an objective study of safety performance of pilots of all ages.

The NIA panel expressed strong dissatisfaction over the fact that FAA had never appropriately garnered data on the issue:
Both the IOM Committee and this Panel have attempted, by every means available to them, to secure and utilize data directly relevant to the questions at hand. This undertaking met with only limited success for three reasons: 1) adequate data have not been collected; 2)in instances where data have presumably been gathered, they are not available; and 3) some relevant data - gathered for other purposes - have not been analyzed in line with the questions facing this Panel.

The NIA panel concluded that "there is no convincing medical evidence to support age 60, or any other specific age, for mandatory pilot retirement. It also found that, although disease and disability increase with age, airlines "have achieved a very high level of safety during the past two decades,"adding:
This achievement appears to be the result of a complex interplay among several factors, including striking advances in technology, a complex system of performance evaluation by air carriers and the Federal Aviation Administration, a variably effective system of government and air carrier medical surveillance, and a complex system of regulations designed to minimize risks to the traveling public. ....One inevitable, but unfortunate, by-product of the present system is the unavailability of adequate data concerning the medical status and piloting performance of air carrier pilots past the age of 60 since, under the age 60 rule, persons have not been permitted to continue as air carrier pilots past that age.

Unwittingly relying on distorted data provided by FAA, the NIA panel cited Booze to the effect that pilot accident rates declined until age 60 and then rose. As shown above, the portion of the data in the FAA's Booze report cited to the panel was not relevant to carrier operations; both its general inferential value and the specific references presented to the panel were misleading. Even so, the NIA report said, "The Panel attaches no special medical significance to age 60 as a mandatory age for retirement of airline pilots."

Debunking FAA's past assertions that the age 60 rule was justified by the danger of pilot incapacitation, the report said:
The Panel concluded, as did the expert committee assembled by the Institute of Medicine, that on purely medical grounds, age 60 is not an age of special significance with respect to the occurrence of either acute events (such as cardiovascular illness or stroke) or subtle changes (such as those in performance and intellectual function) that may adversely affect pilot performance.
(ed. note: footnotes omitted for space consideration)

Assessment #3 was mailed to all Pledgers in the amount of $150.

Most of you probably haven't seen this one.
Pilot Wins $100,000 In Age Discrimination
Case Against Air New Zealand
Friday, July 13, 2001

Auckland: A jumbo jet pilot has won $100,000 from Air New Zealand after the airline grounded him without pay for being too old. Now his union wants to take the case to the Human Rights Commission.

The pilot, Aucklander Godfrey Smith, was a veteran of 34 years at Air New Zealand and its predecessors and by 1998 had risen to be one of its most senior pilots. But the 58-year-old was getting too old to fly into the United States, French territories and other countries with pilot age restrictions.

In August 1998, Air New Zealand wrote to Mr Smith asking him to discuss his options. Mr Smith said he wanted to keep flying as a captain. In January 1999, the airline said because of age restrictions in other countries, he had two months' flying left. Mr Smith complained the airline was discriminating on the basis of age. Air New Zealand then sent him on leave without pay and said he would no longer be rostered on flights.

Air New Zealand argued in the Employment Court in Auckland in February last year that guidelines in most countries other than New Zealand and Australia stated nobody aged over 60 should pilot an airliner. It was impossible to juggle flight schedules so that Mr Smith flew only transtasman routes. Mr Smith's employment contract had been invalidated by his age.

Judge Graeme Colgan ruled on December 12 that Mr Smith should have been paid during the time he was grounded. Judge Colgan said Mr Smith's request to fly Boeing 737-300s was invalid under his contract, but Air New Zealand's age policy had still breached the Human Rights Act. "The plaintiff had been treated in an offhand and careless way without the respect and dignity a senior and loyal pilot could have expected and deserved."

Judge Colgan awarded Mr Smith $84,586 in lost wages, plus 7% interest, and another $10,000 for distress. The decision is mentioned in a law summary booklet that has just been posted to judges and lawyers. Mr Smith said yesterday he was trying to get his job back.
"I'm still going through the process of legal remedies and I really can't say much about it because I don't want to sully the water." - NZPA


Bert Yetman

NOTICE to new members: Our remittance slips go to ALL members every month. Keep your own membership/payment records. If you've prepaid annually, just ignore it. If you pay monthly, mail it back with your check. We save money that way.

An American Lufthansa Air Cargo pilot, John Barnitz, 
writes from Germany:
I do miss the Arizona desert but I just can't bring myself to give up the 42 days of vacation and the 6 weeks of sick leave that Lufthansa Cargo offers! The Lufthansa Cargo contract lets its pilots fly until age 65 as PIC.

Over on the passenger side of the house, the German Cockpit Union (Vereinigung Cockpit) has always tried to limit the age to 55. Then you would retire and get approx. 75% annual salary until reaching the German retirement age of 65. You could extend your contract on a yearly basis until age 60. The Lufthansa Operations Manual set the age 60 limit, not the German Civil Aviation Authorities.

When German Cargo (now Lufthansa Cargo) set up its contracts they had the maximum age at 65, but.... the pilots and flight engineers had to quit flying at age 60 (Operations Manual limit)..... and the salary stopped there too! This was done so the company could avoid paying extra money into the Federal German Retirement system, but it all backfired on them! There is no German Aviation Regulation limiting the age of aircrew to 60 years. Several of the pilots formed a group and sued Lufthansa Cargo for breech of contract. The result being two to three years of back-pay, training to get their 747 licenses up to speed and some of them are back with us flying with us again.

The FAA consistently has refused to collect, publish or analyze data that easily could be obtained to rebut or refute the false assertion that the age 60 rule serves a safety purpose. One of the most obvious ways to prove the safety performance capabilities of pilots of all ages is to collect and analyze data. In 1954, the Aero Medical Association's Committee on Ageing recommended the use of simulators to assess the older pilots' ability to perform. The acting chief of FAA's Medical Certification Branch recommended in March 1959 that the agency assemble and share data from that kind of "periodic testing" of "ability to perform adequately under realistic flight conditions. In 1961, the respected Lovelace Foundation, under contract to the FAA to assess a protocol for evaluating the older pilot, provided an overview of a longer-range study, the outline for a preliminary trial effort, and specific recommendations for a seven-point program that could be implemented immediately with existing data and facilities. And, 20 years later, in response to a congressional mandate, the National Institutes of Health criticized the FAA in no uncertain terms. This criticism focused on the FAA's decades-long failure to (1) adequately collect data, (2) make available data that had been collected, and (3) analyze relevant data that had, in fact, been collected but for other purposes. The NIA (Nat'l. Institute on Aging) panel report recommended that exemptions from the age 60 rule be granted to selected pilots for a "systematic program to collect the medical and performance data necessary to consider relaxation of the current age 60 rule, and provided a detailed proposal for that process. The FAA never responded to the NIA panel's criticisms of its past failures. The FAA has refused to comply with the panel's recommendation for a serious study. In fact, later testimony by the Director of the NIA indicates that FAA official intentionally misled the NIA panel in its 1981 deliberations.

Agency Disseminates False and Misleading Presentation 
of Inappropriately Derived Safety Data

The 1981 report of the NIA conclusively disproved the FAA's two decades of assertions that there was some sort of medical justification for the age 60 rule. Since then, the FAA has no longer been able to use its discredited medical arguments. Instead, for the past two decades, FAA officials have made equally unjustified assertions that there is a safety basis for the rule. The agency consistently, intentionally and purposefully has disseminated false and misleading presentations of inappropriately manipulated data regarding the risk of accident and older pilots.

FAA officials' concerted misrepresentation of safety performance data began with its misuse of statistics in a study that had been conducted by Charles F. Booze, Jr. of the FAA Civil Aeromedical Institute (CAMI). After the NIA report destroyed medical arguments for the age 60 rule, the FAA turned to a distortion of data from the Booze study in order to make it appear that older, more experienced pilots were less safe. The stated purpose of the Booze study had been to ascertain why some general aviation pilots (e.g., doctors and lawyers) had more accidents than other general aviation pilots. In the course of his study, Booze looked at aircraft accident data for only one year-1974. In two of Booze' several different analyses, he computed the risk of accident for all pilots-including doctors, lawyers, housewives, and airline pilots -based on age and experience. Because airline pilots (1) exist only in the age brackets under age 60, and (2) are by far the safest of all pilots, generating hundreds of thousands of essentially accident-free flight hours, but are present only in the under-60 age brackets, the computed risk for those brackets in which they appear are severely depressed. That is, they are severely understated as compared to brackets without these thousands of air carrier pilots and their hundreds of thousands of super-safe flight hours - ages 60 and above. This numerically induced depression in apparent risk - not a change in true risk (either for the air carrier pilots or the general aviation pilots with whom they are "lumped") causes the false and misleading appearance of an increase in risk beginning at the point at which the age 60 rule forces the airline pilots out of the population under study - here at age 60. The phenomenon is not controversial, is well and widely understood, is easy to recognize , and it has been explained repeatedly by researchers with impeccable credentials. Booze himself did not consider the data produced in hi Tables 5 and 7 as representative of an age-risk analysis. In fact, his only comment on that issue referenced his Table 2 (occupation vs. age) where the phenomenon was far more subtle, and concluded that "the relationship of age and exposure (flight experience) remain to be examined.

The FAA's presentation of the inappropriately manipulated, plotted Booze data to the NIA Panel on the Experienced Pilots Study misrepresented Booze' findings by depicting the false and misleading appearance of an increase in risk beginning at age 60 - and undoubtedly was recognized as such by FAA officials at the time.

Two years after the release of the NIA report destroying FAA's medical defense of the age 60 rule, FAA paid for a supposed age-risk statistical study by a non-statistician consultant, Richard Golaszewski, who reproduced the inappropriate and misleading age-risk data from the Booze report. Golaszewski produced a report, the Flight Time Study, that perpetuated the Booze misrepresentation of accident data. Despite its having been rejected and refused publication by the FAA's Office of Aviation Safety from the very time of delivery, this flawed and misleading document has been publicly endorsed and promoted by FAA officials ever since.