Comment by swores

What they're taking into account is their mandatory retirement age (56), which is indeed related to things like reaction times for people as they get older; and then they work back from that to say you need to be young enough to have earned your pension by the time you're forced to retire.

So a rules change could improve things on that front, as they could for example allow working from 40 to 56 to count as enough to earn a full pension, without any change to their safety policy on the age cutoff for finishing working as an ATC - but it wouldn't be cheap, as you not only are massively increasing the cost of pensions across the board, but you're also paying the same amount to train a 40yo applicant as a 30yo one, but getting fewer years of valuable work back from that training cost.