Airline Pilot Career Workshop – A Second Career for 55+ Pilots?

Paula Williams –

Fantastic. And Jim from Brazil says he was flying a B737. He’s a Hawker 400 captain now jet, jet transition instructor. Okay, I guess that wasn’t really a question, so we’ll move on. Let’s see, and here’s another one.

I’m 52 years old, I’ve always dreamed of flying.

 30 years ago I took some, took the theoretical courses in France. Today I train with the flight simulator, is it too late for me to make a career as a pilot now? This is Robin from Guinea.

Captain David Santo –

So Robin I never think it’s too late, the current retirement age is 65. I know that at my airline, we have hired new hires that have been 60. I don’t know whether there’s been anybody hired older than that, but I believe so. So, you really, you know, the, the clock is ticking.

So to get some years of experience in, you really need to do everything you can do right now to pad your logbook, build your time. But if you were hired by 55. So that gives you two or three years, of really getting all of your time built up, your experience built up, you will have ten solid years to work as an airline pilot.

Now after that ten years mandatory retirement at 65. As it looks today, and that might change it might go up. So, you could ride that, that bow wave if it does, but retired airline pilots, still have the opportunity to do things like ferry airplanes. They do maintenance flights, and they also become Sim instructors.

So, I would say absolutely Robin if this is something you wanna do don’t wait, come on over the water’s fine and I think you’ll have a good time doing it.