Coming to an Airline Near You....

"I never would have thought I'd still be flying at 65 [years of age, post-retirement]."
"The jets I used to fly were highly automated. But now, with the propeller planes, I can enjoy a freer, more visual kind of flying. It means getting back to the basics as a pilot."
"When you're young, you can pull an all-nighter. But I read the textbooks [to attain a new commercial flying license] in half-hour chunks. At my age, you have to manage your time."
"I have at least three years left, maybe five [before mandatory retirement at age 70]. As long as I have my health, I want to make the most of them."
Shigekazu Miyazaki, Nagasaki, Japan

"If places like Germany and the United States are raising the age where people can collect pensions to 67, there's no reason Japan shouldn't go to 70."
"We're reaching a point where a 40-year career is just half the average life span, and having people become inactive too early is unsustainable."
Atsushi Seike, expert, labour economics, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan

Airline pilots appear to be in short supply world-wide. Partially this is a factor of new airlines opening in heavily populated parts of the world where, as for example in China, the middle-class is exploding and with disposable income people are becoming more invested in tourism, flying to and seeing other parts of the world they live in, near and abroad. Airline pilots are in high demand, as a result.

Mr. Miyazaki at age 65, retiring from four decades at All Nippon Airways, the largest airline in Japan where 65 is the top for employment, was given an offer of employment that he felt he just couldn't turn down. And which took him right back to doing what he most enjoyed in life; flying. The new airline for which he has become an employee doesn't recognize an age ceiling of 65; he was hired for his experience and his ability by Oriental Air Bridge, flying between Nagasaki to a group of remote islands.

Mr. Miyazaki is quite happy that his work life has been extended. At the same time he is reminded of his age when he realizes how difficult it is for his elder brain to function as it once did as for example, studying for a new license to enable him to fly the Dash 8s the new airline uses. The 39-seat propeller aircraft has an instrument-crammed dashboard, nothing whatever like the jets he was accustomed to flying during his commercial flying career.

His co-pilots are young enough to be his grandsons. And while he's enjoying the new challenge and the opportunity to go on piloting aircraft through the skies over Japan, the transition has been demanding of him. So that he admits to having felt "a little uneasy" with the need to study to enable him to pass the tests to acquire his new pilot's license. It took him eight months to complete the study-test-license process. So he knows his brain has slowed down, its cells grown a little whiter than grey.

True, Japan has the distinction of being known as having the world's longest life expectancy. And because of the pride Japan takes in its 'homogeneity' (read resistance to immigration from other parts of the world), plus its low birth rate, it suffers a general shortage of workers as the population fails to grow other than among its aged population. Over half of Japanese men over 65 years of age perform paid employment of some kind.

Unemployment stands at an enviable 2.8 percent; enviable if there were enough younger workers to fuel Japanese production. Adequate staff to fill the need of employers is difficult to come by even while retirees draining the pension system, alarms government sufficiently to raise the benefit age from 65 to 67, something other nations' economies are persuading them to turn to as well.

When Mr. Miyazaki flew for All Nippon Airline as captain of Boeing 767s mostly to southeast Asia, his salary was generous at several hundred thousand annually, with an excellent pension Oriental Air Bridge, a tiny airline, can afford to compensate him with roughly a third of his former salary. But it is not the salary that has any measure of importance to this man; it is the opportunity to continue flying; compensation is secondary; he has a new lease on extending his professional career.

He emphasizes that to qualify for his new flying license he underwent physical testing that was more rigorously extensive than what a younger candidate would face inclusive of MRIs, electrocardiograms, treadmill tests for stamina. He managed to pass to achieve his prized license. At the present time under federal regulations he can continue flying commercially until reaching age 67; even so government is considering raising the maximum age to 70.

One can only wonder what airline passengers think, what goes through their minds when a pilot the age of their grandfathers clambers into the cockpit to ferry them to remote places, and perhaps whether they will reach their destination. Mr. Miyazaki is having a great old time, and he may have many more healthy and active years to live, but the profession of an airline pilot is one upon which many paying passengers depend on the assumption that the man in command of the vessel is hale as well as experienced in the air, that his reaction time is not age-impaired.

The rise of budget airlines in Asia is said to be one reason why Japan raised the maximum age limit for pilots of commercial airliners to 67 from 65.    Travel Pulse