The age thing

The underwriters declared that at the $100 million liability coverage level, plus the hull value of a new Cessna Citation CJ4, they would no longer insure me—even though I always fly with a crew of two captain-qualified pilots who are in their early 50s or younger.

I had a year’s notice. Last year, our insurer said it would cover me up to 75 years of age. In other words, that meant coverage would end once I turned 76.

The good about assessing risk for older pilots is that there are so few claims. The bad news is that it’s impossible to identify a pattern of risks. But we all understand that age robs everyone of crucial capabilities. At some advanced age we are not as good in the cockpit as we used to be. So, I decided to set out on an honest and realistic assessment of how the passing years have affected my flying abilities, to determine if the underwriters are on solid ground.

Overall health

I’ve been very fortunate not to have suffered any significant health problems yet. My blood pressure has crept up over the past 10 years, especially in the aviation medical examiner’s office, but the FAA approves an array of medications that control the pressure and can be rubber stamped by the AME with no need for any special considerations. I’ve been just plain lucky, and for the many pilots who have faced serious health issues, the underwriters already have plenty to chew on in their risk assessments.

Conventional proficiency measures

I’ve found that the traditional emphasis on landings or flying instrument approaches is meaningless. If you have been able to fly at least a few hundred hours a year, for several consecutive years, you acquire muscle memory. Of course, you can get a little rusty with an extended layoff from the cockpit, but spot landing on the centerline and tracking an IFR approach are automatic at a base level.

The steep turns, stall series, recovery from unusual attitudes, V1 cuts, and other maneuvers that are the grist of FAR 61.58 recurrent training and checking don’t reveal anything about aging. If you could fly them at 65, I’m sure you can do just as well at 75. Many of my older pilot friends shake their fist at the underwriters and declare they’re still as good a stick as ever. I tend to agree with them.

Vision

The optometrist applies the new correction, and you see 20/20 near and far. You even can decipher those infuriating segmented circles on the AME’s vision screening machine. You get a first or second class medical.

But 20/20 at 75 isn’t really the same in real life as it was 10 or 20 years ago. That is particularly true at night, and especially the always-night flying we do in simulators. Reading the nomenclature on the FMS keyboard becomes iffy, and looking for the exact switch you need takes time. Reading a checklist is guesswork, particularly when the checklist writers print critical items in red ink that disappears in the red-tinted lighting. The new avionics suites with their touchscreens are much easier to read and operate in the dark, so helps.

Another issue with aging vision is the extended time needed to focus. The difference is only microseconds, but I, and all older people I know, find it takes more time to focus on the object you’re looking at. Darkness amplifies the delay. When you scan the instruments, look from one side of the cockpit to the other, or bring your attention from outside the cockpit to inside, there is a perceptible lag in time for focus to change.

Hearing

The audiologist’s frustrating testing machine—raise your hand when you hear a beep—says my hearing loss is just about average for my age. Apparently, it is the calendar, not thousands of hours in noisy cockpits, that make me turn up the TV volume too loud and say “huh” a lot.

But degraded hearing has not been any sort of issue in the cockpit thanks to active noise-canceling technology. The magical headsets tame the background noise, allowing the desired sound to come through. And the volume knob takes care of the rest.

The only communication change for me has been a belated decision to give up on the three-ounce Telex Airman 750 that has been my go-to headset in jets for decades. The featherweight headset that is so comfortable on long flights has tiny cushions that rest on your outer ear and simply can’t blast enough volume now for me to hear reliably in a jet cockpit.

Memory

The “having a senior moment” quip has become so trite because it’s true. Age unavoidably changes our memory, both short and long term. And that does matter in flying, particularly if you fly as a single pilot.

When the controller calls with a new altitude, altimeter setting, and frequency, my short-term memory is now challenged to remember each item correctly long enough to read it back and dial in the new info. It didn’t used to be. It doesn’t happen with every new instruction or new frequency, but my memory does fail probably a couple times on each trip. The controller usually spots my mistaken readback, and the pilot in the other seat recalls correctly nearly every time. But, being honest, my short-term memory is fading with age.

Long-term memory has become particularly important in operating the advanced avionics systems we all fly with. Not too many years ago, I often heard pilots older than me complain about the difficulty of learning a new avionics system. They would rather stick with a less capable avionics suite than learn the intricacies of the new equipment. I wrote them off as luddites, unwilling to put in the effort to learn to operate new technology. Now, I am one of them.

The challenges of long-term memory really hit me in my most recent FAR 61.58 training/checking sessions at FlightSafety. Because I have a single-pilot type rating in the CJs, I must train and check at least a little each year as a single pilot even though I never fly solo in the CJs.

I flew that silly circle-to-land approach at Memphis that sim instructors love just fine, but the instructor demanded a go-around just before touchdown. The FMS was on the miss guidance for the ILS that led to the circle, and I just couldn’t remember how to get rid of that approach and enter the new one. I could remember how to do it in a Garmin system and a Honeywell system, but not the Collins suite I was flying. Details of other FMS and navigation systems came flooding back, but not the one I needed.

The instructor froze the sim, and with just a comment or two I recalled how to program the FMS for the new approach. It was marked down as “additional training, successful” and we moved on. But that had never happened to me before. It was embarrassing, but also revealing. Old memories are probably not lost, but retrieving them now takes time that was never required before.

Is it time?

The harsh reality is that I’m not the same pilot I was even a couple years ago. Some abilities and capabilities are gone forever. Does that matter? Probably not today, or even tomorrow. But someday, I may need to do everything I once could.

The underwriters have no data that shows I’m not worth the risk. But they do know that age robs us all. And it’s their $100 million that’s at risk. Each individual risk may be small, but the total risk is too much.

I’ll miss flying corporate jets and the terrific people who made my company such a pleasure to work with. But when I examined my current flying ability, I had to acknowledge that it was time.

J. Mac McClellan is a corporate pilot with more than 12,000 hours, and a retired aviation magazine editor living in Grand Haven, Michigan.