Originally Posted by
2StgTurbine
You have been saying that for years. If you are afraid of checkrides, then you are in the wrong industry. If you passed your private pilot and instrument checkrides, then you should know how to effectively prepare for checkrides. If you fail a seaplane checkride odds are you would have also failed your upcoming commercial or multi engine checkride.
I'm not afraid of checkrides. I fly for a legacy and have the usual ratings, and the usual transport type rating collection.
Originally Posted by
2StgTurbine
Personally, I would rather be working with another pilot who took every opportunity to learn something new in their flight training versus the kind of pilot who went out of their way to avoid "unnecessary" checkrides.
Me too, in the land of rainbows and unicorns.
But the system we live in will automatically penalize you (and by automatic I mean that literally, with no human review) for having a checkride failure, and those can happen to the best pilots, especially in GA where the checking environment is the real (unpredictable) world, and examiners may be more "variable" than in 121.
I just want noobs to understand the potential career risk vs. career benefit... as far as actually getting the job they want.
Entry-level GA checkrides are also easy to forgive... but further along in your career you really don't want any recent ones, they expect you to know what you're doing at that point.
The problem with our career is that it's hard to evaluate people... a white collar guy can generate more resume bullet points, accomplishments, and accolades in one year than a line pilot will acquire over his whole career. If he hits a speedbump, he can get a new job, hustle, hit some balls out of the park, and in a few years it's all ancient history.
Pilots can't be measured on their daily job performance (unless you want a national database for reliability, on-time performance, and stable approaches). So when you apply for a job you get graded on a very few data points spread out over years or decades. Each of those data points takes on an exaggerated significance, especially things from the distant past which *should* be mostly irrelevant years later... but the computer and HR ladies still count it, because they have nothing else to count.