I’m on the cusp of turning 65. I’ve been an airline pilot for 36 years. Here’s the story of going beyond what people said I could.
I am about to celebrate my 65th birthday. For thirty-six consecutive years I have flown commercially—long haul, short haul, in fair weather and storms, carrying thousands of passengers safely and on time. I don’t consider myself a prodigy. I didn’t build rockets. I never worked at NASA or the space program. Far from it. I’m just an ordinary person who found joy, discipline, challenge—and meaning—in flying airplanes and learning every day.
But here’s something I want you to know: even now, even approaching the age many think of as retirement, I pushed myself into new territory. At age 64, when most people are easing off, I embarked on a journey many said was insanely difficult—training to fly the Airbus A350, one of the most advanced airliners in service.
From Boeing to Airbus: Crossing the Divide
For much of my career—twenty-five years—I flew the Boeing 767. It’s dependable, proven, familiar. I understood it inside out: its autopilot, its throttle responses, its quirks in turbulence, its cockpit workflow. But the Airbus A350 is not just a different plane; it’s almost a different language. The operations, the logic, the way the pilots interact with the flight systems, the fly‐by‐wire interfaces, the automated decisions, the avionics—everything feels new.
I had never flown anything Airbus. My training for the A350 would mean immersing myself in a world of automation, advanced electronics, unfamiliar procedures, new instincts. And when Delta asked me to go through the A350 Initial Qualification program, I knew it was going to be a challenge.
The Challenge They Said Was Too Much
People—yes, even some younger pilots—said it would be difficult. Many told me that age matters—that when you hit your late 50s or 60s, your learning curve slows, adaptability dims, that memory capacity or reaction time aren’t what they used to be. They warned me: “At your age, you might not make it through the training.” They described the manual—seven thousand pages of dense technical information. They described endless simulation sessions, oral exams, electronics, systems failures in simulators, emergency protocols, checklists.
Yes—the training was complex. Six weeks in simulators alone. A huge electronic and oral exam. Hours of studying, re-studying, analyzing, practicing repeated scenarios. There were failures. There were moments of doubt. The night when I lay awake thinking “What if I screw this up?” The hours I spent in the cockpit simulator, sweating, learning to juggle alarms, autothrottle, weather systems, flight envelopes.
What Actually Happened
Then I started. I opened that massive manual. I watched the training videos. I stepped into simulators. And here’s what surprised me—not the difficulty, but how well I could still learn. Not just adequately—but extremely well.
I didn’t feel slowed down by age. My memory for procedure, my capacity to absorb technical data, my ability to translate theory into practice—they all held up. In fact, I felt sharp. I felt methodical, disciplined, thorough—with accumulated experience helping me see patterns others might miss. And day by day, session by session, I began to believe: maybe age is a label more than a limit.
When it came to the final exams—both oral and technical—I passed. Not just scraped through, but aced them. The systems, the logic, the “what if this fails” scenarios, the emergency protocols—I handled them well. I flew simulators with precision. I responded quickly. I kept calm.