The safest choice for passengers is the right choice for FAA reauthorization

Washington is debating how to fund the Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees many facets of American air travel including air traffic control, but there is one subject that should not be debated: safety. Take it from my pilot colleagues at American Airlines or from Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who piloted Blackhawk helicopters in Iraq and recently eloquently argued this point in a Time Magazine column.

For commercial pilots, safety is non-negotiable. Period. That’s why the 15,000 pilots of American Airlines, whom I represent, oppose any attempts in the U.S. House or Senate, most recently from Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), to reduce the current standards protecting America’s passengers and crews. 

What are those standards? U.S. commercial pilots, like many others globally, must retire when they turn 65. Furthermore, first officers must get as many as 1,500 hours of actual flight experience to obtain their Restricted Airline Transport Pilot (RATP) Certificate to qualify to operate commercial passenger and cargo flights in the U.S. Both of these time-tested rules have a proven track record of safety, yet they are under attack by’ Thune and Sinema as well as Republican members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee with their currently proposed legislation.

We cannot forget that on Feb. 12, 2009, Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed outside of Buffalo, N.Y., killing 50 people. In the ensuing reports, investigators blamed the tragedy, in part, on inadequate training standards for the cockpit crew. As a result, Congress directed regulators to raise the training requirements to 1,500 hours.

America has not had another multi-passenger airline accident since.

Let me speak on behalf of pilots: There is no defensible reason whatsoever to endanger that stellar safety record. No matter what challenges may face America’s airways, the answer is not to lower the bar of real-life flight training for airline pilots transporting our loved ones. Nor is the answer to lower the bar on pilot fitness — certainly not without research to back it up. Yet, the House’s proposal to reauthorize the FAA, which passed in June, would raise the mandatory retirement age for pilots from 65 years of age to 67.

Raising the retirement age is ill-advised for a host of reasons.

First, much like the 1,500-hour training rule, the current retirement age is about safety. Numerous studies, including one by EASA in 2017, have noted an increased risk of cardiovascular issues, diabetes and cognitive decline at this advanced age.

Second, raising the retirement age is an untested proposition without the proper evidence to support it. Even the secretary of the U.S. Transportation Department, Pete Buttigieg, has said as much: “We don’t think this is the time to change that, and I would want to see a lot more data before we could feel comfortable with any kind of change to that.”

Finally, raising the retirement age could actually worsen, not improve, training and scheduling bottlenecks. The current standard is an international limit, set by the International Civil Aviation Organization after careful study, and it requires pilots in multi-crew operations to retire at age 65. Therefore, if the U.S. changes its retirement age, older pilots will lose the opportunity to fly internationally. Instead, to keep flying, they will have to displace more junior pilots from their domestic flights, sometimes on different equipment, thus increasing the number of training cycles and exacerbating the training bottleneck that currently plagues our system.

The U.S. should not lower the bar for safety; we should remain the “gold standard” for safety, which must include securing a permanent, confirmed leader of the Federal Aviation Administration. The last time we went so long without one, we were caught flat-footed and slow to react when concerns emerged regarding the Boeing 737 Max crashes that took 346 lives.

For passengers and pilots, safety is non-negotiable, especially when the margin for error is already too small. Just last month, a private jet came within 100 feet of another plane, in the seventh runway incursion to be officially investigated since the beginning of 2023. America’s passengers rely on the highest safety standards from us, their pilots. They deserve the same from Congress.

Captain Ed Sicher is president of the Allied Pilots Association, which represents the 15,000 pilots of American Airlines and has been a pilot for nearly four decades.