From the PPF web site
The truth about the origins of the age 60 rule is disclosed by two contemporaneous sources of credible evidence: (1) a 1961 paper by a Stanford Business School professor, Karl Ruppenthal, recounting the open history of the origin and preparation of the rule, and (2) an extensive and hitherto private collection of FAA documents amassed by Dr. Homer Reighard, who had been at the FAA during the rule's inception, and who retained the documents until his retirement as Federal Air Surgeon 1984. The Reighard files were obtained through litigation under the Freedom of Information Act. Any doubt that the age 60 rule originated in labor strife, or that its purpose was to resolve the labor dispute in management's favor, is dispelled by Reighard's trove and Ruppenthal's paper. The latter recounted that in the mid to late 1950s several airlines sought unilaterally to impose age-60 retirement policies. At three carriers (Western, TWA and American), however, the pilots resisted through their contract grievance machinery. All three of these grievances were decided in favor of the pilots' position through neutral arbitration. Western Airlines defended its position by arguing that the issue was not suitable for arbitration because it concerned the safety of the carrier's operations. The arbitrator rejected each of Western's purported "safety" arguments, ruling:
There is no testimonial basis and no 'fact of life' on which we could be expected to take a kind of 'judicial notice' that supports the view that it is unsafe to let a pilot perform after the age of 60. That is not to say that there is not some age - - say 90 - - when we would take judicial notice of physical impairment beyond all reason. It is enough to say that the evidence here does not support the theory that the attainment of age 60 is in itself enough to disqualify a pilot.
American Airlines adamantly refused to comply with the binding arbitration. Management noncompliance with the arbitration order became an issue in a costly strike that lasted from December 20, 1958 to January 10, 1959. Smith agreed to reinstate the pilots as part of the settlement of the strike - but delayed doing so while conspiring with Quesada to engineer the imposition of the company's age 60 rule as a federal regulation. Administrator Quesada retired shortly thereafter and promptly was elected to a seat on the Board of Directors of American Airlines.
The true origin of the age 60 rule is revealed in secret letters that Smith wrote to Quesada. In a February 5, 1959 letter on his personal stationery, Smith wrote to Quesada:
Dear Pete:
During the course of our recent negotiations with the pilot's [sic] association we found it unwilling to agree to the company's policy concerning retirement of air line pilots at age 60.
I have no specific recommendation to make to you at this time. It appears obvious that there must be some suitable agre [sic] for retirement. It appears equally obvious that as men become older the result of the usual physical examination becomes less conclusive.
It may be necessary for the regulatory agency to fix some suitable age for retirement.
Ten months to the day from Smith's first private request, the age 60 rule became a federal regulation with full force of law - purportedly justified, as Smith had suggested, by conclusory assertions of medical uncertainties.
Within eleven days of Smith's plaintive plea of February 5, a four-page medical justification for the rule had been drafted. Within about four months, the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) was published in the Federal Register - replete with purported medical justifications.
On March 9th, just over one month from the date of Smith's letter, Reighard himself (apparently not yet fully "in the loop") prepared a memo to the Acting Chief Civil Air Surgeon, noting that airline captains were required to accomplish a proficiency check twice yearly, and suggesting that this proof of "ability to perform under realistic flight conditions" should be a reasonable test of airline pilots. Reighard further suggested that the FAA consider offering its services to the airline companies to "interpret existing medical knowledge" to ensure the adequacy of age considerations during the required periodic testing regimes. The suggestions apparently fell on deaf ears, as there is no evidence that they were ever acted on.
A "Record of Visit" retained in the Reighard files dated February 8, 1960 recounts a visit in which a supporter of the recently adopted age 60 rule claimed that the older pilots passed their physicals by going to the same doctor who "does not give a very rigid physical." As an addendum, the writer stated that "Dr. Reighard checked a sample of ten of the forty pilots known to be active airline pilots over 60 and found that no two of the ten went to the same examiner." (There were not forty pilots known by the FAA at that time to be over 60 and active airline pilots. A little over two months earlier, the Air Surgeon, James Goddard, had explained that the number 40 was nothing more than an approximation based on the fact that there were seven pilots over 60 at Eastern Air Lines, and that Eastern Air Lines was thought to represent "a one-sixth sample of the total air carrier pilot population." )
Correspondence between Quesada and the Rev. Theodore Hesburg, president of Notre Dame University, indicates that the Administrator spared no effort in seeking endorsements for the proposed age rule. Father Hesburg admitted he had no relevant expertise, but gave his endorsement anyway. Quesada, in turn, admitted that he also had no data on which to base the proposal, and was aware that he was on treacherous ground when he asked for confidentiality because "premature revelation might make [the regulations] much more difficult to achieve."
Smith, of American Airlines, in a letter to Clarence Sayen, the president of the pilots' union, disingenuously sought agreement on the retirement issue or, alternatively, agreement to petition FAA for a regulation. What Smith withheld from the union was the fact that he already had approached Quesada directly and received the Administrator's promise of support, and knew full well that the FAA rulemaking process was well under way.
Responding to a request by Quesada, Smith prepared a three-page memo to Quesada April 30, 1959, on plain paper, with the notation, "Mail to home address." In it, Smith provided results of American's 707 jet retraining program, numbers of pilots already retired, and age groups of pilots then employed by the airline. The Administrator had charts prepared from Smith's transition training time data. These charts became Quesada's favorite presentation when arguing for the proposed rule. However, as documented herein, this argument was abandoned after it was reviewed by FAA attorneys, who recognized there was no objectively sound basis for the rule.
Primarily on the basis of a presentation of Smith's transition training time data at a June 3, 1959 meeting hosted by Quesada, an FAA Advisory Panel of eight hand-picked experts endorsed an age 55 limit for jet transition and, after some debate, an age 60 rule for retirement. Dr. James Birren, one of the original panel participants has declared that the unwitting panelists, unaware of the labor controversy surrounding the issue, agreed in favor of only temporary adoption of an age 60 retirement rule. The economic purpose of the age 60 rule was noted in a memo by B.W. Hogan, Rear Admiral, MC, USN, reporting on the panel's meeting. Hogan began his memo by repeating some of the data he obtained at the meeting: The older pilots' seniority allowed them to "bid in" to the jet positions; this meant a boost of $4,500-$5,000 a year (in 1959); and it "takes the older pilot longer, thus costing more money, to transition to the Jet aircraft."
The FAA obtained letters from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare providing data on "sudden attack" (arteriosclerotic, including coronary, heart disease and stroke) for "white males for the year 1957." But these July 1959 letters did not address the fact that, as a congressional report later noted, airline pilots did not fit the norm for "white males" but rather were a "highly select group…more free of serious pathology than a sample of general population of similar age."
Quesada - responding on August 5, 1959 to a request by ALPA's Sayen - admitted that FAA did not have in its possession "a comprehensive library of" reference materials on which the age 60 rulemaking process was based. Instead, Quesada provided a list of 41 documents that he said ALPA should review on its own, while he also said other (unspecified) documents would apply as well. In an unrelated deposition, Reighard revealed Quesada's list of 41 documents to an EEOC attorney who then collected the documents for review. The EEOC attorney found that many of the documents predated World War II, most concerned readily testable physiological functions, only eight had to do with accidents and age, only seven related to mental condition and age, and all of these looked at populations much younger or older than age 60. This list of outdated and largely irrelevant documents, provided at the request of an interested party, gains added significance in light of the fact that the FAA in 1973 lost the entire 1959 docket of age 60 rule materials.
