The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, moving away from its long-standing policy that airline pilots must retire at the age of 60, wants to let them work in the cockpit for as many as five years longer, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The agency's emerging support for raising the mandatory retirement age to 65 comes as foreign airlines and regulators are adopting similar changes, said the report, which quoted industry and government officials.

If left unchanged, the current rules over the next decade will require thousands of passenger and cargo commercial pilots -- some projections total more than 30,000 aviators -- to retire at age 60, regardless of their health, according to industry officials.

The report said that FAA Administrator Marion Blakey is crafting the new position slowly but steadily.

Before spelling it out publicly, she is expected to gauge the willingness of incoming Democratic leaders in Congress to take the lead in advocating such moves.

The FAA's apparent change of heart is influenced by the current globally tight market for pilots as well as the lack of recent scientific data demonstrating any clear-cut erosion of safety from extending the careers of pilots, according to one person familiar with the matter.

Keeping the age limit at 60 is becoming more difficult to defend, following a move by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency that sets non-binding global safety standards, to raise retirement age at airlines world-wide, according to the report.

The organization said last month that airline pilots could safely stay behind the controls until they turn 65, as long as the other pilot in the same cockpit is younger than 60. Even before that, a few foreign carriers had pilots who were older 60 while flying into and out of U.S. airports with copilots, the report said.

Source: Xinhua