Originally Posted by Bellanca

So 1500 hours of what you describe is going to magically make these pilots ready for 121 world?

Whether you support the 1500 hour rule or not, the fact is that a majority of people will get to that 1500 hour mark by mostly instructing - many by never setting foot in anything more complex than seminole or duchess. Complex, high performance and multi-engine planes are getting to be tougher and tougher to insure. Many will reach ATP minimums without experience in much bad weather, very little IMC, no flights into icing. Where I'm at now I would say that 90% of days with low overcast that would be good for things like practice approaches are not flyable either due to icing conditions (october - april) or T-storms in the summer. In fact, one place I did some training at did not allow ANY flights into IMC.

This is where better training at the airline level comes in. If you want to prevent Buffalo type crashes (at least that was the impetus for the new law), there needs to be better training in type and dealing with bad wx, crm, vastly more complex aircraft than a trainer, and other conditions that most people will not get much experience of during their time-building. 10 sim sessions may be enough to pass a checkride, but doesn't cut it when you're taking someone out of a 172 and throwing them out to the real world in a jet.

I want to clarify that my opinion is not meant to bash CFI's (I am one, and have learned so much from it), but I'm highlighting the importance of better training programs at the airline level. In a training class you are going to have people with many different backgrounds and experience levels (even if they all have 1500 hours in the logbook), and all of them have to be ready for whatever is going to be thrown at them in the real world once they're out of training.