Yup. That's exactly the world we live in. Even if I amass 10,000 or 15,000 hours of flying, flew some Shuttle missions, was Blue Angel commander, etc., etc., that would probably come up if anything ever happened.

I understand the media are generally stupid concerning aviation, the problem is the lawyers. They're the ones who force the airlines (and other employers) to live in some kind of fantasy world where simple answers are proposed in lieu of examining real issues.

One example of that is how you hear a lot about MR's checkride history and his lack of experience in the Q. But you don't hear anything about his copilot's clean checkride history and that she had something like 700 hours in type.

The whole reason this thread began was because of the discovery of Bill Honan's e-mails voicing his doubts about Renslow's capability to be PIC. I think that is far more damning in a legal sense than MR's failures, although I can't figure out how somebody with so many 121 stumbles made it into the left seat.

If you were to study the backgrounds of the pilots involved in every crash in the last 20 or 30 years, how many of them would have had perfect check ride histories? I would guess that many of them were perfect or almost perfect. So it can't really be a factor can it? What about attitude, nonchalance and get-there-itis? Look at American 1420: it's happened because the pilots insisted on flying through a TS to land at Little Rock instead of holding for a few minutes to let the storm pass. That was a judgement issue, pure and simple, and completely unrelated to training records. I could bore you with more examples.

There's just more to flying than what you did in primary training. But despite that, I understand it's easier to sift out people through a simple metric than think too much about their entire experience. Another thing is quite simply that as long as there are enough guys with no busts on their records, the airlines don't have too much reason to interview someone like me, despite the absurdity of the fact that I've already done the job.

If anything, I'm more paranoid and anal about those kinds of things BECAUSE of my failures. The whole thing mystifies me. I can name dozens of historical examples of people who stumbled and fell early in their career and then went on to be competent professionals.

If the regionals were the Constitutional Congress, they wouldn't have picked some guy named George Washington to lead their army because he lost a garrison and was captured with his troops during the French and Indian War in the 1750s.

If they were Abraham Lincoln, they wouldn't have picked some dude named Ulysses Grant to lead the Union armies because he had quit the army in the 1850s after a mediocre career and then went on to fail in repeated business ventures.

Maybe in today's media/legal climate, the president couldn't promote a guy like Grant because CNN would dig up all the rumors about his drinking, etc.

It raises interesting questions about the state of our culture when people (lawyers) who know nothing about a profession (military, aviation, medicine etc.) nevertheless have a huge impact on it.