Ms Black's entire testimony was a talk about apples and oranges. She tried to persuade the committee into thinking that the new regulations are making things less safe calling things the "unintended consequences" of the regulations.

She said that the regionals are now having to do a lot more training because the pilots are no longer coming from aviation schools directly, they are having to go to non commercial aviation jobs to earn hours and that is causing them to need to be "retrained". The retraining means more hours of training. Not the case. In the past all of the new hires were not low time guys. A new class would have a lot of pilots from Comair, Midwest Express, and other defunct airlines. There were also a lot of pilots going from American Eagle to other carriers for quicker upgrades. They all had a lot of experience. Now the classes are mainly new pilots to aviation. They take the same training or less than the ones of the past coming out of aviation schools with 210 hours. So yes, on the average a class takes more hours to train but if you are comparing new pilot to aviation to new pilot to aviation they required training is far less. The 1500 pilot does much better than the 210 hour pilot. Every pilot with 3000 will tell you that he was a safer pilot with 1500 hours than with 210.