Originally Posted by JohnBurke

Thanks for spelling it out. Maybe next time use a pop-up book and pictures.

There's no "1500 hour rule," and the ATP has been around for a long, long time. It's quite irrelevant to this mishap, but thanks for injecting irrelevant political diatribe into the thread.

Let me spell it out for you. Neither one of them had an ATP, and neither one of them was required to have one. The subject of the thread is snapchatting and the use of personal electronic devices in lieu of paying attention to flying the airplane, not ATP certification.

Your straw man assertion might apply to every aviator who dies short of obtaining the ATP, or if you prefer, 1,500 hours. Saved from another airline mishap? Bull ****.

I've flown with plenty of ATPs who weren't worth their weight in wet salt, in large, widebody, transport category airplanes. The natural extension of your macabre rationale is that we'd have all been better off if they'd been killed early on. Again, what an idiotic thing to assert.

In the case of the instructor who was snap-chatting, an assertion that somehow ATP minimums played into his mishap, or that he was saved from reaching them, is at best a god damn idiotic suggestion, and you assume on hell of a lot. What this kid did when in his early instructing hours is not necessarily what he would have done at 1,500 hours, or in a type training program, or beyond. When I was his age, I was spraying crops and flying formation under powerlines while doing it, but having flown and worked around airplanes since I was a kid, I made a lot of stupid mistakes, like. many of us, and my understanding, attitude, and judgement evolved (and continues to evolve). What I knew yesterday, I know differently today, and will know another way tomorrow. Are you asserting that. the snapshot of this kid in the Warrior is exactly how he'd remain a year from now? Five years? Ten years? What makes you think he'd have passed a checkride? Wouldn't it be up to the judgement of the check airmen evaluating him? (why should they bother: you're taking care of the evaluation now). Better off dead, to save others in the future?

You really want to go there? Well, god damn.