Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Will customers at your company die if you make a mistake? I do not support age discrimination (roughly around 40), but also want to survive my flights, medical procedures, and anything else where age impacting ability intersects with life safety. A tricky balance for sure.

The military has some rough age bands as well: https://www.usa.gov/military-requirements

Maybe dial back the age restriction with strong workload automation around airspace situational awareness and routing?

View on HN

Is there documented scientific evidence demonstrating that pilots, surgeons, etc over 40 crash more with statistical significance? 50? 70? I’m sure there is a date when that does happen, but if you are going to be slapping age related restrictions on everyone, you had better come in with guns blazing on your numbers demonstrating that statistically this is bad for society

In short, yes. It's an evidence-based qualification. FAA takes this stuff seriously.

Cool. Makes sense. Where is the evidence that was used to make this determination and the document released by FAA using that evidence to make said determination?

two comments above this one?

The “two comments above this one” you reference didn’t exist when I made the original comment

Its easy to find. This tone suggests that the person's argument is somehow invalid because they reference easy to find documents without linking them. Perhaps this isn't the intent, but it reads to me as combative, which seems unnecessary.

There's lots of room to nitpick the evidence, but the studies are published:

> The relationship between age and job performance for Air Traffic Control Specialists (ATCSs) is an issue that has been revisited many times over the past few decades (Trites, 1961; Trites & Cobb, 1962; Cobb, 1968; VanDeventer & Baxter, 1984). Researchers have consistently found a negative relationship between controller age and performance across studies that have used different ATCS options (enroute, terminal), career stages (age at entry into training,current age on the job), and criterion measures (on-the-job ratings, academy performance) (Trites, 1961;Trites & Cobb, 1962; Cobb, 1968; VanDeventer & Baxter, 1984).

Via https://www.tc.faa.gov/its/worldpac/techrpt/AM99-18.pdf

Thank you! This is the kind of data and study I was looking for. In this rather large thread you are the only one as of the time of this posting actually answering the original question I asked, “why does the rule exist?”

I don’t really see a problem with discrimination like this in this context as long as there is a well published scientific background of studies demonstrating why it makes sense, and there aren’t confounding variables (like a history of discrimination) that would skew the results. In this case it looks legitimate and well studied.

My only beef/complaint otherwise is that these papers should be front and center on the application page explaining why only 30 and unders are accepted.

Will customers at your company die if you make a mistake?

This is pretty true across all sorts of industries.

Like guess where a lot of product recalls come from. Or consider some of the reasons that structures fail.

>Will customers at your company die if you make a mistake?

This is the dumbest distinguishing point you could think of. Have you heard of hospitals?

Many hospitals screen older doctors (or all doctors) for their continued ability to perform.

https://undark.org/2020/06/24/mandatory-screening-older-phys...

Haha. Yes.

In one of my jobs I was responsible for a tank of Acrolein which if it vented to atmosphere would kill 150,000 people in New a Orleans.

Can I get some mechanical protections and peer review in there?

Sure. It was kept under conditions where if it was exposed to atmosphere it would immediately auto ignite and explode, obliterating about 10% of the chemical plant.

As a safety precaution.

Explosion was the desirable alternative because the products of combustion were far less harmful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com