Let Experienced Pilots Fly Act: Age Rule, Shortage, and Safety

The Let Experienced Pilots Fly Act is a House bill, introduced in the 119th Congress as H.R. 5523, that would raise the mandatory retirement age for U.S. commercial airline pilots from 65 to 67.¹ It would amend 49 U.S.C. § 44729 to let medically qualified pilots keep flying scheduled airline operations for two extra years.² The bill has cleared the House once before as part of a larger reauthorization package but has not become law, and a recent international vote has narrowed its practical footprint even if it passes.

What the Bill Would Change

The core provision amends 14 CFR 121.383 so that the age in the regulation reads 67 rather than 65.¹ Every multicrew Part 121 operation is covered, meaning mainline carriers and regional airlines alike.

The bill also includes a return-to-service provision. Pilots who have already turned 65 and left airline flying could come back and serve in multicrew operations up to age 67. That is a departure from the 2007 law that raised the age from 60 to 65, which was deliberately non-retroactive.

Medical standards would not tighten. Pilots over 60 already must hold a first-class medical certificate that expires every six months, requiring a full exam twice a year.³ The bill specifies that pilots would not face additional or more frequent examinations solely because of age, unless the FAA Administrator decides safety requires it.²

The Rule Being Amended

Under current federal law, no airline may use a pilot, and no pilot may serve, on a Part 121 flight after reaching age 65.⁴⁵ Part 121 covers scheduled airline operations, the flights most people picture when they think of commercial aviation. The cap was 60 until 2007, when Congress enacted the Fair Treatment for Experienced Pilots Act and pushed it to 65 to align with international standards.

The retirement age applies only to Part 121. Pilots who reach 65 can still fly for charter operators, corporate flight departments, cargo carriers certificated under Part 135, and in private operations. The FAA imposes no age ceiling on those categories.⁶ Many forced-out airline captains do exactly that, though at a fraction of major-carrier pay.

Why the Bill Wouldn’t Apply to International Routes

This is the bill’s biggest practical limit. The International Civil Aviation Organization sets a worldwide standard: in multicrew commercial flights, no pilot may serve after reaching age 65, and once a pilot turns 60, the other crew member on the flight deck must be under 60.⁷ The bill itself acknowledges this, carving out an exception so pilots over 65 would not fly into airspace where a higher U.S. limit is noncompliant with ICAO.

Supporters had hoped ICAO would raise its own limit. When Rep. Troy Nehls reintroduced the bill in 2025, ICAO’s 42nd Assembly had a proposal on its agenda to move the international ceiling to 67.² Member states voted the proposal down, citing safety concerns and age-related health risks. The international ceiling of 65 remains in place.

The consequence is concrete. Pilots aged 65 or 66 would be limited to domestic routes. At major airlines, the most senior captains fly international widebody aircraft, and those are the pilots closest to 65. If they stayed on past 65 but could not fly international routes, they would need retraining on different aircraft for domestic service, displacing junior pilots from those seats.

The Shortage Argument and the Pushback

Supporters frame the bill as a response to a workforce crisis. Boeing’s 2025 Pilot and Technician Outlook projects North America will need 119,000 new pilots over the next 20 years, and 660,000 globally. Smaller regional carriers and rural routes have taken the hardest hit, with some airlines cutting service to small airports because they cannot staff enough crews.

The Air Line Pilots Association disputes the shortage premise. ALPA argues the United States has more certificated pilots than available airline jobs, and that the real bottleneck is airlines choosing not to improve pay and working conditions at regional carriers. From that view, raising the retirement age papers over a business-model problem by extending the careers of a small number of senior captains.

The numbers cut both ways. At any given moment, only a few thousand airline pilots are within two years of turning 65, so keeping them flying would not, by itself, close a 119,000-pilot gap over two decades. But supporters argue even modest near-term relief matters when specific routes are being canceled.

Impact on Seniority, Pay, and Career Timelines

The airline pilot profession runs on seniority. A pilot’s seniority number determines aircraft, routes, seat, and pay. Every year a senior captain stays in the system, every pilot below waits longer to move up.

The international restriction compounds this. Consider a captain flying a Boeing 777 on international routes who turns 65. Under the proposed law, that pilot could stay on but would be barred from international operations, requiring a transition to a domestic aircraft type. That sets off a chain of displacement:

The staying or returning captain retrains on a domestic aircraft, say a Boeing 737, taking a seat a more junior captain currently holds.
The displaced captain either moves to a less desirable aircraft or bumps down to first officer on a larger plane, pushing someone else down in turn.
First officers waiting for captain upgrades see their timeline extended by two years, with a direct hit to earnings.

Every transition requires expensive type-rating training that the airline pays for. ALPA has argued the training backlog would be substantial and would not meaningfully increase the total number of pilots available for domestic routes. Airlines and unions would also need to renegotiate collective bargaining agreements to address how pilots over 65 bid on routes they cannot legally fly, a process that carries age-discrimination litigation risk.

For the pilots who would benefit directly, the money is real. Senior captains at major carriers earn well over $300,000 a year, and many earn substantially more, so two extra years at the top of a seniority-based pay scale is a meaningful bump to lifetime earnings. Pension impact varies by carrier. Where the plan formula caps at 25 years of service, a captain who has already hit that cap gains nothing more from the pension itself, though they still gain two years of high salary and continued retirement contributions before drawing down.

Safety Concerns

The opposition argument that resonates most with the public is safety. Age-related cognitive and physiological changes are real, and the mandatory retirement age functions as a population-level safety measure rather than an individual fitness test. Even though many 66-year-old pilots would pass any medical screen, the probability of sudden incapacitation or subtle cognitive decline rises with age across the population, and aviation safety policy is built on managing aggregate risk.

Supporters counter that the twice-yearly first-class medical exam already screens for those risks individually, and that modern cockpit automation adds margin. They point out the age was 60 before 2007, and moving it to 65 produced no measurable decline in safety.

Insurance is a secondary concern. In general aviation, pilots in their late 60s and 70s already face rising premiums and reduced liability coverage as underwriters price the higher risk. Whether that dynamic would meaningfully affect airline insurance costs is unclear, since airlines self-insure much of their risk and operate under different actuarial models than individual aircraft owners.

Where the Bill Stands

The concept has been through Congress before. In the 118th Congress, Rep. Nehls, who chairs the House Aviation Subcommittee, included it as an amendment to the FAA Reauthorization Act. The House passed that reauthorization 351 to 69 with the age provision attached.² The Senate stripped the age provision before the reauthorization became law, leaving the age 65 rule intact.

In 2025, Nehls reintroduced the measure as standalone legislation, H.R. 5523, in the 119th Congress.¹ The bill faces the same dynamic as before: significant House support, strong Senate opposition from labor-aligned and safety-focused members. The October 2025 ICAO vote removes what would have been the bill’s strongest practical argument, since the international restriction now looks permanent for the foreseeable future.

The underlying statute, 49 U.S.C. § 44729, was separately updated by the 2024 FAA Reauthorization to expand the definition of “covered operations” to include certain large Part 135 operators, but the age 65 limit for Part 121 airline pilots was not changed.⁴ Whether H.R. 5523 can clear the Senate this Congress remains an open question, and its path has grown narrower since the ICAO vote.

1
Congress.gov. HR 5523 – 119th Congress (2025-2026) – Let Experienced Pilots Fly Act of 2025
2
Representative Troy E. Nehls. Rep. Troy E. Nehls, Aviation Subcommittee Chairman, Reintroduces the Let Experienced Pilots Fly Act
3
eCFR. 14 CFR 61.23 – Medical Certificates: Requirement and Duration
4
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 49 USC 44729 – Age Standards for Pilots
5
eCFR. 14 CFR Part 121 – Operating Requirements: Domestic, Flag, and Supplemental Operations
6
Federal Aviation Administration. What Is the Maximum Age a Pilot Can Fly an Airplane
7
Federal Register. Pilot Age Limit Crew Pairing Requirement