• Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?

    Go here:

    Edit Account Details and Profile

New Pilot AND NFO Max Age Limit!

Reg-A-Muffin0716

Reg-A-Muffin0716

Resist, Retaliate, Press Forward!
So, I just got a text from my recruiter in NRD San Diego. She stated that the new maximum age limit for flight programs is now 32. Ain't that something beautiful, Ladies and Gentlemen?

Let the fun begin. Hooyah, and Fly, Navy!
 
Reg-A-Muffin0716 said:
So, I just got a text from my recruiter in NRD San Diego. She stated that the new maximum age limit for flight programs is now 32. Ain't that something beautiful, Ladies and Gentlemen?

Let the fun begin. Hooyah, and Fly, Navy!
Click to expand...

While those who were over the age limit are cheering this, if you were under the age limit before you must realize the door has been opened for more competition, this is a way to make sure the USN gets the best possible applicants they can. I would not be surprised if the average GPA and ASTB of those selected climbs.
 
NavyOffRec said:
While those who were over the age limit are cheering this, if you were under the age limit before you must realize the door has been opened for more competition, this is a way to make sure the USN gets the best possible applicants they can. I would not be surprised if the average GPA and ASTB of those selected climbs.
Click to expand...
Something else is how well the older candidates will perform in flight school. The USAF seems to have done fine with slightly higher age limits than "must be commissioned by 27th birthday" that the Navy held pretty hard for a long time, but 32 for everybody instead of by exception is going to make ripples in the pipeline.

The older students in their mid/late-twenties are generally more cautious than the young ones (22, 23, and 24 year olds) and sometimes this makes them take longer to figure things out in primary pilot training. It's the same reason your car insurance drops when you get that age- the insurance companies are well aware that your brain learns to be more careful around that age (and they have the crash statistics to back it up).

Young people experiment with dumb stuff behind the wheel in their teens and early twenties; late twenty-somethings and thirty year olds not so much. Younger people are also dumb enough to think they could pull off landing on a boat in the ocean, fly really close to other aircraft, do loops, spins, flips and shit, and they think those things are really good ideas. Older people look at that in one of two ways: either they are smart enough to know better, or they pulled it off before so they believe they can get away with it again.

All that said, the training pipeline will be fine, it'll just have to adapt.


And if you're thirty years old, schlepping around an office job, and you want to be a naval aviator or a naval flight officer- then forget everything I just said and go for it.
 
Last edited:
NavyOffRec said:
While those who were over the age limit are cheering this, if you were under the age limit before you must realize the door has been opened for more competition, this is a way to make sure the USN gets the best possible applicants they can. I would not be surprised if the average GPA and ASTB of those selected climbs.
Click to expand...
Retention being what it is, to me it looks like they may be expanding the pool of candidates to keep the same standard but get more bodies.
 
NavyOffRec said:
While those who were over the age limit are cheering this, if you were under the age limit before you must realize the door has been opened for more competition, this is a way to make sure the USN gets the best possible applicants they can. I would not be surprised if the average GPA and ASTB of those selected climbs.
Click to expand...
That would be a good thing for the Navy in general, and might be (at least partially) the intended purpose of the change.
 
Jim123 said:
The USAF seems to have done fine with slightly higher age limits....32 for everybody instead of by exception is going to make ripples in the pipeline....All that said, the training pipeline will be fine, it'll just have to adapt.
Click to expand...

I am doubtful that raising the age limit will result in a big increase in older trainees, I'm not sure many qualified folks in their late 20's or early 30's are going to be rushing to the recruiters. By that time a good chunk of the folks who are qualified for military flight programs have somewhat established themselves in a career and life in general, making the choice to join the military for ~10 years a more challenging choice for them. Even though the age limit wasn't too high when I went through very few folks had any significant gap between college and flight school, the older folks generally just took longer to get through school or marked time while they applied to get in. The big exception I can see would be prior service or enlisted, giving them a little more time to get in.

As for flight school having to 'adapt' I just don't really see it having to much at all, I think the numbers will be pretty small overall and while folks might be a little more cautious as they get older I don't that will be as big a factor in flight training, which is pretty safe, as you seem to suppose. I think changing technology and the search for cost savings will have a much bigger impact on flight training than a few old dudes/dudettes wending their way through the pipeline.
 
I can see that- the number of 27-31 year olds being only a small number of the overall students.

I'd love to hear @Uncle Fester 's opinion on older students and the training pipeline, from his experience working in student control at NASC. API is a slightly different animal than pilot training, but students are students...
 
Jim123 said:
Many words
Click to expand...
I can’t remember who told me this. Might have been a flight doc, but I’m not sure. But supposedly the NAMI shrinks did a study of student age and performance, and the attrition rate went significantly up after a certain age for just those reasons. And that’s one of the variables they used to set the max age for studs.
 
nittany03 said:
I can’t remember who told me this. Might have been a flight doc, but I’m not sure. But supposedly the NAMI shrinks did a study of student age and performance, and the attrition rate went significantly up after a certain age for just those reasons. And that’s one of the variables they used to set the max age for studs.
Click to expand...

The wildcard in this is that American society is so heterogeneous. NAMI has been trying, for decades, to get wrapped around aptitude testing and devising a system to rack and stack flight applicants before they come in the door. It's not that easy. Some foreign militaries, in smaller and less diverse countries, use aptitude testing more successfully than we do because their hiring pool is homogenous. Basically if you have a hundred candidates (or a thousand, or...), all of them with very similar backgrounds, then it's easier to evaluate each person and more accurately predict their future success. If they have a lot of different backgrounds then it's a lot more variables to correlate.

[shrugging emoji]
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top