Originally Posted by Adlerdriver

If a pilot is "mindlessly sitting in an airplane" then they probably shouldn't be there. I don't know what you did for your first 1500 hours of flying time, but by the time I got to 1500 TT, I had some pretty solid experience. I don't believe anyone is saying that a certain number of hours is going to determine how good a pilot is. There are more subjective evaluations of that throughout the training process. It's simply a starting point.

Whether it's instructing, 135 single pilot ops, military flying, there's value in flight hours and experience. Keeping a 250 hour product of a puppy mill out of an RJ cockpit where what little skills and experience he has will atrophy is a good thing. It's possible a pilot could fly 1500 pattern only flights, 1 hour at a time around his home drome in a -152, rack up 1500 hours and few thousand touch and gos and meet the requirement. But when he goes to his interview, the quality of his flight experience is going to come out. If they decide to hire him, there's still the hurdle of initial training, the sim/LOFTs and IOE. Same thing if and when he tries to upgrade. The guys upgrading in 6-12 months maybe those guys you mentioned who were out-flying everyone when they had 500 hours and have decision making skills that would water your eyes. Who knows? But there has to be some level of trust in the evaluations these pilots are given during training before they're released to the line. A lot of flying and valuable experience can happen in 6-12 months. You scoff at 1500 hours of flight time as a benchmark for a new-hire, but somehow 6-12 months is your personal cutoff to allow a guy to upgrade? What's acceptable there? 15 months? 24? Back to hours again? Chances are the guy's showing up with bare minimum qualifications as a new hire wouldn't be ready for upgrade if they tried.

My point is that most guys with 1500 hours have probably flown those hours doing something other than "mindlessly sitting" and there are some pretty good filters beyond just hours before they arrive in the right seat of something flying passengers. So, hours are not the one an only thing being looked at when evaluating a pilot's capabilities, but there has to be a minimum. Using the flight hours required for an ATP seems like a reasonably good starting point.