This article uses the framework of designing a commercial aircraft to illustrate how a personal defined-contribution (DC) pension plan should be designed if it is to achieve its objective of delivering an adequate and secure retirement pension. The article's suggestions are based on similarities between a DC pension plan and an aircraft journey. For example, the strategic investment strategy is analogous to the aircraft, the plan provider is analogous to the aircraft operator, the contributions are analogous to the fuel, and the accumulation and decumulation stages are analogous to the climb and descent stages of the flight. The significant differences that exist between the two concepts are also highly instructive.

This paper uses mortality fan charts to illustrate prospective future male mortality. These fan charts show both the most likely path of male mortality and the bands of uncertainty surrounding that path. The fan charts are based on a model of male mortality that is known to provide a good fit to recent UK mortality data. The fan charts suggest that there are clear limits to longevity, that future mortality rates are very uncertain and tend to become more uncertain the further ahead the forecast, and that forecasts of future mortality uncertainty must take account of uncertainty in the parameters of the underlying mortality model.

Many, if not most, individuals cannot be regarded as 'intelligent consumers' when it comes to understanding and assessing different investment strategies for their defined contribution pension plans. This gives very little incentive to plan providers to improve the design of their pension plans.

This study sets out a backtesting framework applicable to the multi-period-ahead forecasts from stochastic mortality models and uses it to evaluate the forecasting performance of six different stochastic mortality models applied to English & Welsh male mortality data. The study also finds that density forecasts that allow for uncertainty in the parameters of the mortality model are more plausible than forecasts that do not allow for such uncertainty.