I dunno friend.

Imagine you were a rich person appointed to a position where other rich people were sending you on millions of dollars worth of vacations and you could deprive the less fortunate of the right to their own bodies with the stroke of a pen?

If someone told you to take that away from yourself after you'd gotten used to it, would you?

FlipSide: You're one of 'the good ones' who's fighting the good fight (looking at you RBG) and the 'bad guys' are going to replace you with one of them. Retirement in that case is giving up on humanity.

I had FMCs leading into CAT III Autoland available to me for last half of my career, and that is a far more capable system than these. But it always has limitations lower than a manual landing. And I have seen it f*ck up biggly (for which maintenance always found an excuse). You can always make a nice video, but the underlying issue is how many nice videos you get out of 1000 attempts to make that nice video.

So you have the magic button that sort of/kind of works. At this price point it won't be fail operative. And it will be limited in terms of winds, so are you willing to only fly when your destination and enroute airports are less than 10 knots of crosswind?

But this only deals with the pilot conveniently going 100% incapacitated. The bigger issues are subtle incapacitation, bad judgment and botched landings/takeoffs.

I left aviation at 62, and I miss the airplane everyday. I started flying at 14, and it was my life and identity. But I as I wrote earlier, I did not want to be "one of those guys". A parallel is that I also manage my own retirement portfolio, and professional reviews over the years have twice told me that things were well planned and to keep doing what I am doing. Nevertheless I have planned for a transition to professional management (and I do have a very detailed written plan). Cognitive decline is a very real thing, and I am not talking about dementia. A normal, healthy person who lives to a ripe old age will still suffer from a slowing startle response (the biggest thing I have seen in older pilots) and decreasing situational awareness.

I don't fly airplanes anymore. I enjoy driving my GTI. Sometimes my wife lets me drive her Z4. I have a higher end road bicycle that I enjoy putting miles on. But at some point all of that will pass, too. Aging is a lot about grasping your decreasing abilities with grace and dignity. Best to be one step ahead of it.

EDIT: Just to add that i upvoted you because I think that was a reasonable response to a rational discussion. That should be a given, but this is reddit.

Each decade is different, with pluses and minuses. Overall, I have not minded aging up to this point. But that said, I don't like what I see coming down the road!

>Former small passenger aircraft here.

Science has gone too far!

They require 3rd class medicals, but I do know someone around 70-72 still taking people on tandems.

Source: am tandem skydiving instructor

Roger, Roger.

Yeah, my grandfather-in-law has a small plane. Keeps asking me when I’m going to take some lessons so he can leave it to me in the will…

I’ll get right on that when I get a break from supporting his grandkid through school, raising his great grandchildren, and basically trying not to starve.

Harrison Ford comes to mind

This generation of pilots is going to experience a large amount of health related crashes as the years go on.

My son is 19 and his friend is working on his private plane license, so to get hours they fly to Orlando every now and then. The looks they get when 2 teens pull up to the private owner entrance is hilarious. It’s definitely an older person environment. (Friend has a trust from losing his dad to pay for plane)

It's also a sign of the times, those people are part of the batch of individuals who were able to afford those private planes well before retirement and they flew them for a long time. So they are attached to them. It's just not possible today for the same quantity of individuals.

We have a problem here in NY where all the public small plane airports are just completely loaded with the planes of geriatrics sitting indefinitely. You can't even do flight school here because there's nowhere to park, lol.

Lotta pilots that age got in when they were young. Sixty years ago, it was a shitload cheaper to get into than it is today.

Except you're forgetting that it's not just their life they are risking. They are also risking the lives of everyone on the ground where they may crash. If there wasn't a passenger to save the plane this old guy could have taken out an innocent family in a house, or a bunch of students in a bus. Commerical pilots get forced retirement at a certain age, and requires a a second person in the cockpit in case of incapacitation. Seems like there should be some type of regulation for a private pilot as well.

President Trump vomits words profusely

If it's got wings I can crash it!

It’s also not a vineyard. It’s covered in low viney shrubs and that’s where it got the name

Right, if you want to see a location named for Stewart you have to visit Martha's Prison Cell.

American. I totally thought that as a kid!

Actually just a random British person from 1600

It’s an awesome place, btw

You and me had the exact same thought, i thought it was martha stewart

I grew up on the west coast and as a kid I also thought it was a vineyard owned by Martha Stewart.

Born and raised in California, and I spent half my life thinking the same.

There happen to be a lot of wealthy people in both counties, but most of them aren’t there year-round and have suppressed the ability of islanders to actually exist on their own land.

When I was getting my pilot's license in Florida a couple decades back, all my friends were in accidents with old drivers in huge cars. It was a problem.

Crashing isn't a problem, it's the sudden stop that gets you

The last part from about 1,000 feet is indeed the most dangerous since it's still enough of a fall to kill you and you need to be slowing for the actual landing, but slowing is also dangerous because it's speed through the air that keeps your up. Tricky what?