Originally Posted by
Burt123
A player on a farm team needs to prove himself athletic skill wise in order to get picked up by a major league. In aviation your “skills” are a direct correlation to your logbook hours or “experience” if you’re one of those believers. There’s a ton of pilots at regionals with far more “skills” than their counterparts at the majors. So how does this compare to a farm team and major league again?
Sanicom is correct, my perspective is similar. The majors have a very high consistency for pilot quality. That can be measured in raw skill and also "cultural" quality which correlates to professionalism.
Regionals are menageries... you have inexperienced pilots who are developing potential, experienced pilots waiting for the call, and a few who are stuck by choice or circumstances.
But you also have incorrigible slackers, attitude cases of all stripes, deviant personalities, and misfit toys hiding out in the regional ranks. There's enough of that to make it hard for the good ones to establish a reliable safety culture... you're caught between resisting normalization of deviance and not wanting to come off as a tool.
Professionalism and SOP can be taken for granted at the majors (of course there's always the 1%).