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Older Pilots OK to Fly, Study Shows
EurekAlert May 22, 2003
An airplane pilot's experience is a better indication of crash risk than his or her age, Johns Hopkins researchers say. They found in a
study of 3,306 commuter plane pilots that those with more than 5,000 hours
of flight experience had less than half the risk of a crash than less
experienced counterparts. Results are published in the May 15 issue of the
American Journal of Epidemiology. During the study
period, the pilots flew 12.9 million flight hours and had 66 aviation
crashes, yielding a crash rate of 5.1 per million pilot flight hours.
Crash risk remained stable as the pilots aged from their late 40s to late
50s. One hundred and five study subjects died, 27 of whom were fatally
injured in aviation crashes. "Federal
aviation regulations prohibit airline pilots from flying beyond the age of
60, but the relationship between pilot age and safety had never been
rigorously assessed," says Guohua Li, M.D., Dr.P.H., lead author of
the study and professor of emergency medicine and of health policy and
management. "Performance in most flight-related tasks such as
decision-making, tracking, takeoff and landing does not differ
significantly between older and younger pilots. The lack of an association
between pilot age and crash risk may reflect a strong ‘healthy worker
effect' from the rigorous medical standards and periodic physical
examinations required for professional pilots." Among the pilots
studied by Li and colleagues, 99 percent were male and 69 percent were
ages 45 to 49. On average, the pilots had 9,749 hours of total flight time
and 287 flight hours in the six months prior to the start of the study.
The majority of pilots (86 percent) did not have any health problems
although 68 percent required corrective lenses for distant or near vision.
Researchers tracked
their exposure to flight and safety performance from 1987 to 1997, using
records from the Federal Aviation Administration, the National
Transportation Safety Board and the National Death Index as guidelines. "Our study indicates that chronologic age by itself has little bearing on safety performance," says Susan P. Baker, co-author of the study and professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health. "What really matters are age-related changes, such as health status and flight experience." Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
