The 30 year maximum age for hiring is there to make sure controllers have enough time working to earn pension benefits before mandatory retirement.

Hiring someone older would be setting them up for a very bad time later in life.

Thats logic doesn't fly for any other profession

It's because no other profession has the combination of (1) forcing people out of a highly trained role so young (with no options to reuse those skills in any other roles - forcing folks to go have to go back to square one and get a new professional education to move anywhere else), along with (2) the peculiarities of a government pension.

Unless you overhaul the way government workers earn retirement, or we decide that it's safe to employ older air traffic controllers, any other choice would be highly exploitative.

Yes that logic applies.

Any federal law enforcement position has this. For example, for the FBI or the secret service, you must enter by 37 and retire by 56.

Shouldn't it be up to the individual to determine whether they want to take that bargain? What about those people who did well enough in their previous careers for retirement not to be a concern and desire a new technical challenge that serves the public?

If you can make an exception to the rules to force them to retire early, you can make an exception to the rules to let them earn pension benefits faster.

> Hiring someone older would be setting them up for a very bad time later in life.

If they spend 20 years there, and get 20 years worth of pension, what's the problem? They can combine it with whatever savings and pensions they had before being hired at 36.

Unless you're saying they don't get any pension, in which case stop screwing people over that way and cut the pension qualification to 5 years or less.

I've heard that the bottleneck is apparently the the number of students that can be admitted to the FAA Academy to be trained, not the number of applicants.

I don't know what the state of the art is, but in the 2010s there was a huge mess where a 'biographical evaluation' test was required of ATC applicants, with the timing such that you took it after the FAA prep courses. The evaluation was thinly veiled racism, utterly uncorrelated with ATC performance, and one of the big outcomes was that anyone taking the prep courses was very likely to get weeded out by the biographical evaluation and thus suffer a total loss of his time and financial investment in the course.

So ,that was another problem they were causing themselves in manning.

Edited to add documentation: https://kaisoapbox.github.io/projects/faa_biographical_asses...

The real reason is that pilots work in shitty conditions and their education is expensive. And skills are not transferable making it all pretty bad deal.

We're discussing ATCs, not pilots. (And pilots are frequently hired after the age of 30.)