I’ve commented to a couple of my contemporaries lately that I’m amazed at how my “pilot” job has evolved at F9.

These days, I spend about 5% of my mental energy flying the plane with the rest being spent trying to keep this ongoing dumpster fire of an operation from causing death and devastation.

On nearly every leg, I find myself resisting outward pressures to ignore significant deficiencies just to keep the operation moving. I find it ironic that our most recent FOM modification requires that we discuss “threats” to the operation when the operation itself (and the enormous untrained change in SOPs via the aforementioned FOM revision) are almost always the biggest threats we’ll encounter.

I consider myself fortunate to have had nearly 8000 hours of rightseat F9 Airbus time before I upgraded a little over 4 years ago. I also appreciate the fact that many (most) of the FO’s that I flew with when I first upgraded were also very experienced in the Airbus.

What concerns me now is that we’ve got new captains who have minimal time in the Airbus combined with minimal time in the F9 system who are facing the most dorked up operation anyone can fathom... who will now be paired with new FOs who may have zero or almost zero 121 time or jet time.

This isn’t a dig against the new guys. Everyone was once inexperienced. It’s not their fault. It also doesn’t change the facts... they’re inexperienced. The reason we’re contemplating hiring inexperienced folks is that anyone with any experience at all won’t come to work for this ****hole at the wages we’re offering.

If safety really was even in the top 5 on our corporate priority list, we’d raise wages to attract appropriately experienced pilots.

Flame suit on...