Originally Posted by
WheelInTheBack
While your math may be correct (I don’t really care enough to calculate it out and see if it is), my response was in your statement that FOs who don’t feel ready to upgrade at 1000 hours should find another career. While my flying skills are just fine and probably in some areas well above average, I don’t think my experience as a CFI would have made me any more ready taking on the captain role at 1000 hours. Maybe it would have. I don’t really know. I’m sure as I got closer to upgrade eligibility I would have focused in more on some of the things I’m maybe not as polished on. I probably still would have held off a little bit until fully feeling ready and I don’t blame others for doing the same. Perhaps demonstrating even more need to try to retain the employees is that I bailed before hitting 1000 hours though, and probably won’t be able to upgrade at my current company until well above 1000 hours. I’m ok with it.
Nobody asked you to take on a 121 CA role at 1000 hours of CFI time, it wouldn’t even be legal. But lots of people have upgraded after 1000 hours of 121 time. If you have been flying 121 SIC for a year and a half - which is about what it’ll take to get to 1000 hours these days assuming your airline has an adequate supply of CAs - you have had 1000 hours of opportunities to pick your various CAs brains, to use them as a role model (good or bad) for learning how it’s done and deciding how you want to do it, not to mention probably four or five hundred nights in a company paid hotel room where you could have been studying the FOM and honing your knowledge.
But seriously, going to another job as an FO and getting a different type - especially in a heavier aircraft - will move your career along too, although if you are afraid of unspotlessing your PRIA (the topic of the thread) that’s probably as much work as or more than prepping for CA. But there are many paths to success in aviation, not just one.
Like I said, it isn’t punitive, it’s just math. An outfit with 100 CAs is only gonna fly 100,000 hours a year max, it doesn’t matter how many hundreds of FOs they might have. And similarly, the FOs collectively are only going to get those 100,000 hours of SIC time to divide among them. It’s a zero sum game.