Retirement, Reflection, Regret
My last flight was July 30, 1999. My 60th birthday, beyond which I couldn't fly under the FAA's age 60 rule then in effect, wasn't until October 22, 1999. I could have chosen to fly until October 21, but I didn't. Here's why.
In 1988 while a 727 pilot for Evergreen International, I wrote an MS-DOS program to do weight & balance for large cargo aircraft. Towards mid-1999 they contacted me to do a rewrite for MS Windows, and we agreed on a price. I had regulary done work for them on the DOS program as required up to that time, and our arrangement had always been verbal, not written, and they had always paid the bill, although often slowly. Thus when I agreed to do the rewrite, I didn't ask for a written contract. They wanted the rewrite done by the end of 1999. Flying right up to my 60th birthday would have made that difficult, and I decided that I had best retire a little early so as to be able to meet the deadline.
A few weeks into retirement and into working on the rewrite, I got a call from the Evergreen manager who was my liaison with the company as well as a personal friend. He advised not doing any more work on the rewrite until I received a written purchase order from them, which he was trying to get processed. A few days later he contacted me with the news that Evergreen was going into a severe cost-cutting program, they would continue using the old DOS program, and to forget about the Windows rewrite.
Thus my reason for retiring 12 weeks earlier than I otherwise would have disappeared. My regret in having bailed out early was immediate, and as the years have rolled by, my having given up those last 12 weeks of flying has become one of my greatest regrets.
Evergreen got along with that old DOS weight & balance program for the next 14 years until their bankruptcy in 2013. I continued making changes to it as required, and they continued paying me for my time to do so up until 2012. In late 2013 they contacted me for a small change, and I told them I'd be happy to do it as soon as they paid me for work I had done in 2012. They said they'd get back to me on that. A few weeks later they ceased operation and filed for bankruptcy. I never did bother to try and get the money. Their list of creditors was long, and they went out owing employees a lot of money.
Tower Air, the airline I retired out of, ceased operation and filed for bankruptcy less than a year after I retired. For some Tower pilots that was their second bankruptcy as we had former Pan American, Eastern, TWA, and Continental people.