The whole thing comes down to attitude.

I've had the pleasure of flying with both low time and high time pilots (air force,121,GA) and honestly, the attitude and or competence of the pilots is not directly proportional to the the amount of hours they have. The attitude and or competence they have comes from how they were taught, their reasons for being a pilot, their love for aviation, maturity etc, and also their experience level - which, is in fact not directly proportional to the amount of hours they have in their log book.

I've had in flight emergencies with a private pilot and a commercial pilot and the commercial pilot was the one who ended up freaking out and loosing it.

I've found that pilots whose attitude reflected more of a concern with learning, rather than climbing the ladder of success, are the better pilots.

The thing is you can have a 1000hr pilot whose spent 900 hrs doing touch and goes. Then you can have a 250hr pilot, whose spent 100hrs single pilot imc... and had three inflight emergencies

The stance is that if you have more hours, then you have more experience...only because the chances are you've seen more and the shiat has probably hit the fan a couple of times.

I believe experience comes from situations.....the consensus is, the more time you have the more likely you are to have had 'situations'. This doesn't bode well for low time pilots, however you could have had all your 'situations' in the first 200hrs of flight which ended up changing your whole attitude/views towards this flying gig.

Remember one of the main reasons for the hiring minimums is because of airline insurance premiums. They pay cheaper insurance if the guys and gals behind the sticks are high time pilots. These insurance firms also think that the more time you have the more experience....well in theory they would be right....but in my experience it all depends.

Nobody gets paid for stick and rudder anymore......you get paid for, well,.... if it hits the fan, you're the guy/gal they want in the cockpit.

JayHub