Originally Posted by
Duffman
I get the feeling 1500 hours was an arbitrary number and most guys learn more about being an airline pilot from sims and OE than all of their 1500 hours combined, so there must be a faster way to condense that experience. But you make a good point that our safety record is significantly better than most overseas airlines and everybody I fly with uses autopilot because they're lazy, not because they have to, so the process is working.
1500 hours is maybe arbitrary, but 1500 (and 200+ ME) hours also used to be the point where you could get a call from a regional back in the day... maybe they knew something back then. I'd say 1000 is the bare min, and that checks with R-ATP numbers (750 is fine for mil, since their process is quite rigorous compared to a low-time civilian pilot).