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Old 07-20-2016 | 11:00 AM
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RemoveB4flght
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There are so many variables besides flight time.

I have flown a mix of regional, narrow body, and wide body aircraft to every continent on the globe except Antarctica. Currently I sit left seat on the 777, and my company employs pilots from over 100 nationalities and backgrounds. I fly with a mix of First Officers, all with their individual plusses and minuses.

Some who come with previous wide body experience have thousands of hours on long haul routes and have only flown big jets, but shockingly few landings as there are many airlines that hardly allow FO's to touch the controls, and many have not taxied a plane since their cessna days. I have those who came from regional and narrow body short haul. They have good RT, and situational awareness on the ground, and if needed could flip off the automation and hand fly a beautiful ILS. They don't however tend to have much experience outside the part of the world they came from. Things like weather planning over a 12-20 hour duty period, fuel planning for ETOPS and reclearance flights, contingency planning over parts of the world shorter range aircraft rarely tread, changes in flying and emergency procedures in different countries airspace... even the proclivities of ATC in various countries. Finally we have our own home grown cadet pilots. Typically they begin on the narrow body, however some were initially placed as "cruise" first officers, only allowed in the seat above FL200. It was found to be counter productive however, as they lacked the general flying experience to provide much more input other than spinning a heading bug or changing a radio frequency. Fortunately that was scrapped as it wasn't beneficial to anyone.

To summarize, whether I'm flying over the north pole to LA, the Southern Indian ocean to Australia, or across Africa and the ITCZ to Brazil... give me a pilot from any of those backgrounds and I'll find the positive experience that he or she has to contribute, but outside of the wet-behind-the-ears low hour cadet, there's no clear case to be made that any one pilot is more suited for wide body than the other.
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