Originally Posted by RyanP

The 145 is actually a lot more fun to fly than the 175 and the new hires would be much better off learning in it to be honest. If it was up to me they would all start out in it and would all become better pilots because of it. THEN, move up to the 175 auto-jet after they mastered that. You actually got to fly the 145, it's very forgiving, like a trainer, hard to get yourself into trouble, can go as slow as you want, decent like a rock if you need too, its very basic and you learn a lot about flying simple basic jet aircraft with large margins of error built in and a huge safe speed range to play with, and you are regularly hand flying different things in all kinds of conditions, very short runways, uncontrolled at night, crappy weather hand flying approaches, actually flying stars and crossing restrictions manually, fun visual approaches into podunk fields with no tower, and it teaches you a lot.

The CRJ 700 is a step up, it is more advanced, more of a critical wing, slats, less forgiving up at high altitudes, less forgiving with speeds, harder to slow down, more powerful, it will bite you in the a ss if you screw up and get too slow up high, heavy or hot, it's harder to land, you do WAY less non precision approaches, less fun visual approaches, mostly all you do is controlled field, big airport, straight in ILS type of crap just due to the nature of where we fly it.

Where the E175 you don't really "fly" it at all anymore with auto throttles and VNAV, you're just an automation monitor, you program the FMS to do EVERYTHING, then just sit back and make sure it actually does it, no more pushing buttons on the overhead or using judgement to make a crossing restriction, no more trying to slow down and maintain speed in gusty winds on an approach, no more thinking about what do I need to do now to make this happen, it does it all for you until you click off the autopilot at 50' for landing. Hand flying it is discouraged. Then you don't even pull the thrust levers back to land, it even does that for you at 30'. You really don't do anything anymore. Yeah, it's nicer and bigger, and way better for the passengers, but flying it isn't even flying anymore. This is from someone that has been on all 3 of our jets now.

Honestly the Saab was the most fun plane here I flew and glad I did it. The 175 is boring compared to the others and will make you lose all your skills, your scan will go to hell and you will become lazy since you are no longer even required to fly it at all once you learn to program the box on this thing. The one thing actually beneficial about the 175 is it is a good transition aircraft to a 737/Airbus or similar mainline aircraft because the FMS/auto-throttles and VNAV is about the same.

Funny thing is if you were to click off the autopilot and auto throttles on a new hire on the 175, take away his VNAV info and tell him to fly the STAR into DFW with all the between altitude step downs with speed restrictions, he would be completely screwed because he has no experience or skills to do it because of this jet normally doing everything for you, and that is how we are trained to operate it. It's not their fault, they never learned to actually fly a jet without all the higher level automation.. just the way it is now.

Nothing wrong with flying a 145 or a CRJ7, both are way the hell better than a C-172 or a Seminole.