Originally Posted by
The Juice
The three pilots for AF447 had close to 22,000 total hours between the two of them. The two First Officers had 9,000 of those hours, with close to 5,000 in the A330. These are not "newby pilots" as you referred to them as being.
Dont like flying and the idea of younger relief pilots making position reports in the dark over the atlantic? Then fly an airline from the States and enjoy a couple of grey hairs up there at the controls.
Dont mistake aircraft size and length of flight as a measuring stick on the difficulty level. Flying a highly automated aircraft across the Atlantic, in my opinion, is nowhere near as mentally tasking as flying a commuter turbo prop in and out of uncontrolled airports, 8-10 times a day, in an aircraft that is less than "advanced" from a technological standpoint.
Agreed. My BE1900 days were far more taxing both physically and mentally than I what I do now flying the A320.
That being said I think it is important to emphasise that a highly automated aircraft requires more background knowledge of aircraft systems and logic. Plus AF447 exposed a significant gap in knowledge that many pilots of swept wing aircraft had about high altitude stalls. After AF447 my last airline began high altitude stall training. The initial scenario we would use was similar to the AF447 scenario and surprisingly nearly half of the crews did exactly what the pilots of AF447 did. These were not young guys either, many of these guys had decades of experience and tens of thousands of hours. Nobody had ever trained high altitude stall in a swept wing aircraft and that is a very different animal than a low altitude stall. Recovery takes a lot longer, requires significantly more nose down pitch and requires a very gentle pitch up movement after the initial stall is broken, no more than 1 degree per second or you find yourself in a secondary stall. You also have to accept significant altitude loss in most cases.
My point to all this is that it is not necessarily hours that make a pilot safe. Hours, training, types of flying all play a role. Taking an ERJ or CRJ pilot with 2,000 hours experience and properly training them in an Airbus should be fine. Taking a 15,000 hour BE1900 guy and putting him in Airbus without proper training could be dangerous.