A little gray at the pilot's temples has long been valued by operators and passengers alike, since it signaled long experience. But with the general economic meltdown of 2008 that saw 401K plans halved and pensions disappear, the gray will become total as many business aviation pilots who had planned on retirement in the next five years remain in the cockpit for quite a bit longer.

The community will benefit from that long and ever more valuable piloting experience. But the downside is an increasingly aging pilot population that, statistically speaking, will suffer deterioration in sensory, perceptual and cognitive properties, along with motor skills, alertness and endurance that are all important to piloting excellence.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University examined accident records to determine if accident patterns changed according to the ages of the pilots involved. The authors followed 3,306 commuter air carrier and air taxi pilots who were aged 45 to 54 years in 1987. During the following 10 years, those pilots accumulated a total of 12.9 million flight hours, during which 66 of the pilots experienced aviation crashes, yielding a rate of 5.1 crashes per million pilot flight hours. The authors found that the accident risk remained fairly stable as the pilots aged from their late forties to their late fifties. They also found that flight experience, as measured by total flight time, showed a significant protective effect against the risk of accident involvement. Pilots who had 5,000 to 9,999 hours of total flight time had a 57-percent lower risk of an accident than their less-experienced counterparts. The positive effect of flight experience leveled off after total flight time reached 10,000 hours.

So does experience offset or forestall some of the negative effects of aging? To a certain extent, yes &and no. Researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Stanford University School of Medicine found that expert knowledge may compensate for some age-related declines in basic cognitive and sensory-motor abilities. (Cognition is the important mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning and judgment.) They studied 118 pilots aged 40 and 69 over a three-year period on items such as executing air-traffic controller communications, traffic avoidance, scanning cockpit instruments, and executing an approach to landing. Pilots with the most experience had better flight summary scores at the beginning of the experiment and also showed less decline over time. The study found a definite advantage of prior experience and specialized expertise on older pilots' skilled cognitive performances.

One of the most common symptoms as we grow older is the apparent increase in memory lapses, a symptom that is not offset by experience. The aviation environment demands recall and places a premium on memory resources. We're all forgetful on occasion; however, with increasing age, forgetfulness becomes more frequent. The University of Michigan Health System's Memory and Aging tells us that after age 20, humans begin to lose brain cells and our bodies begin to manufacture less of the chemicals needed for the brain cells to function.

Short-term memory is the information we remember temporarily, often for less than a minute and then it is easily replaced by new information. During inflight operations our short-term memory serves to recall a plethora of rapid-fire directives, including often-complicated taxi clearances, new altitudes and radio frequencies, and sometimes even more in a single amended clearance.

And pilots are susceptible to declines in this important ability. "Aging, Expertise and Narrative Processing," a 1992 study, found that pilots exhibit age-related declines in the recall of aviation-related materials even though the older pilots had significantly more experience. "When Expertise Reduces Age Differences in Performance," another study by the same authors, found that older pilots showed more errors in the recall of ATC clearances.

Other leading memory problems in the aging person include a decline in memory storage, requiring more time to learn new information, and the inability to pay attention to several things simultaneously. Obviously, these problems impact good piloting. There are yet other aspects of memory loss that have a negative effect on pilot performance. One is transience, which is forgetting information with the passage of time, and then, too, there's absent-mindedness. Have you ever felt the correct information is "on the tip of my tongue" but still unavailable? This is termed "blocking" and is another aspect of memory that deteriorates with aging. Some of the other maladies include developing a false memory, which is the unconscious reshaping of a memory because of personal beliefs or mood, and negative distortions of the memories of a traumatic event.

There are some steps a senior pilot can take to prevent memory loss. While genetics partially governs our ability to remember, there are lifestyle changes that can help slow down this aging effect. In its "Improving Memory: Understanding and Preventing Age-Related Memory Loss," the Harvard Medical School found that leading a healthy lifestyle including physical health, minimal emotional stress, limited consumption of alcohol, a healthy diet, abstinence from smoking, and at least six hours of quality of sleep each night could act synergistically to help reduce memory loss. Physical activity can also reduce memory loss by increasing the flow of blood to the brain and promoting the growth of new brain cells. A minimum of 30 minutes of exercise on most days is recommended. A healthy low-fat diet, including fruits and vegetables that contain antioxidants and fish and other foods that contain omega-3 fats may help nourish brain cells as well as limit the buildup of cholesterol in the arteries.

Age-related memory loss can also be checked somewhat by engaging in activities that challenge the mind. When learning continues, the brain forms new connections between nerve cells. This helps the brain store information and retrieve information, regardless of age. The Mayo Clinic's "How to Keep Your Mind Sharp: Prevention Action" has an extensive list of such activities. Mental challenges include learning to play a musical instrument, learning a foreign language, changing careers, developing a new hobby, volunteering, staying informed about world events, reading and interacting with other people.