Originally Posted by
maddogmax
Currency is nothing more than another discriminator. It's like needing to have 20/20 vision to fly for the military or get hired by an airline 30 yrs. ago, having a college degree, etc. Once in, none of that matters.
I once gave A330 OE to a FO at NWA who had not flown an airplane for 13 yrs. ( 10 yrs DC-10 SO, 2yrs ALPA and 1 yr. Medical) He could barely talk on the radio but made it through with lots of extra time. He was a great guy who worked hard and knew he was behind the 8 ball.
We can't really say currency is "nothing more than a discriminator", and then go on to cite an example of someone 13 years non current (although 10 of those years on the flight deck plumbing) who still needed "lots of extra time" and knew he was "behind the 8 ball".
Companies don't want to hire lots of new hire pilots that are stastically going to need lots of extra time and are going to be behind the 8 ball. They will usually hire a few though, and carry the majority of them through. But its never going to be the norm and that's completely as it should be. If someone wants a multimillion dollar career with your company its really not too much to ask that they do some grunt work for a few months knocking the rust off.
That can be done a number of ways from job hopping at an airline that's easier to get on with to getting a type rating to as little as doing a BFR/IPC refresher (probably a bit more than the couple hours minimum…don't you hate it when people treat the least amount of training allowable by law as a syllabus goal?).
Being non current (regardless of how you define that, from 91+ days to 10+ years) is rightfully considered a negative. Its also rightfully hardly ever considered to be an insurmountable negative, and to any extent its considered a negative, its really not that hard to mitigate it and get hired anyway.
Like someone else said, there's plenty of "desk jockeys" that either found a way to stay current or quickly got re-current to get the job they wanted.