Originally Posted by
forgot to bid
I see this from time to time and have to disagree. No pilot group will allow their company to drive up wages to attract new hires. They won't have a problem attracting new hires.
Which goes to the next point:
This isn't always a good thing. I spent a few days in a hospital with my son, rarely found an American doctor or nurse that understood or could communicate clearly what the issue was. I fear the day when you have to go overseas to find pilots who meet a logbook requirement. That said, 1500 isn't hard to meet anymore.
So put the hour minimums wherever they want, still wouldn't have prevented 3407, they both exceeded 1500 hours. As far as I can tell, 100% of the Part 121 crashes have been with pilots with 1500+ hours and an ATP acting as the PIC. Given the ATP can be done rather quickly in a PA44 for not much money, the requirement for an ATP is a big eh to me.
Until we clean up training and standardize it like it should be nothing is truly getting fixed. 1500 hour minimum? Go for it, don't care, won't feel any safer just because the FO had 1500 hours when they were hired and given the current shape of the pilot market and the current trend to park 50 seaters (albeit to grow larger but yet scope limited fleets) I don't think it's going to make much of a difference.
----
As to this petition, NO. I wouldn't want a pilot who didn't want to be a CFI. That's a red flag to me.
I know what you mean regarding all the pilots having 1500 hours. Today it doesn't really make too much difference. But I think with this bill, the 1500 hours really does.
It creates a filter that weeds out those who don't really have the skill and natural ability to be an airline pilot... but are able to buy their way through enough CRJ transition courses to get into an RJ... or tough it out long enough and squeak by that 250 hour mark and get to an airline.
It takes an entirely different kind of person to be able to accumulate 1500 hours. It means that they've successfully instructed, flown commercially in some other manner, and plain worked hard and been successful at what they've attempted. A lot of people who got hired at 250 hours but are on the weaker end of the spectrum, even though they may have thousands now, probably wouldn't have been able to pull off getting to 1500 hours on their own. They would've been weeded out in the process and never ended up in that RJ cockpit. The 1500 hour pilots in the future will probably, overall, be of much higher caliber than the 1500 hour pilots we have flying RJs today.