"This is your gray-haired captain speaking... Relax"

NEW YORK, Feb 27 (Reuters) Air passengers should feel quite safe when the pilot is getting on in years, a new study shows. Older pilots actually show less decline in their aviation skills over time than their younger peers.

In the US, pilots are required to retire at age 60, and opponents of this policy say that nobody has been able to prove that a decline in ability occurs at that age.

Like expert chess players and musicians, say Dr Joy L Taylor and colleagues, highly skilled pilots have built expertise that can offset the loss of certain skills that comes with aging. Their findings have implications for understanding the competence of all older workers, not just pilots, they add.

Taylor, at the Stanford/VA Aging Clinical Research Center in Palo Alto, California, and her team looked at 118 pilots ranging in age from 40 to 69, following them for three years. The pilots were divided into three levels of expertise based on their Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rating.

The pilots were tested annually for air-traffic controller communications, traffic avoidance, scanning instruments, approach to landing, and summary flight score.

The most expert pilots scored highest on tests of flight performance, and showed the least decline in their skills over time.

Their performance was particularly strong in communication and approach to landing. Level of expertise was more strongly associated with a pilot's skills than the amount of time spent flying each year.

Regarding age, older pilots initially performed worse than their younger colleagues, but their scores showed a slower decline over time. This was primarily because the senior pilots showed more improvement in their traffic avoidance abilities.

''These findings show the advantageous effect of prior experience and specialized expertise on older adults' skilled cognitive performances,'' Taylor states in a press release accompanying the study. ''Our discovery has broader implications beyond aviation to the general issue of aging in the workplace and the objective assessment of competency in older workers.'' In the journal, two editorialists argue that it is ''time to reconsider fixed age limits for the workplace and consider transitioning to competency-based evaluations of performance.'' They suggest this might apply to other highly skilled professionals, such as surgeons.

REUTERS BDP ND0856