Originally Posted by
hatetobreakit2u
he didnt say we need to get rid of old time pilots and replace them with low time pilots
all he said is anyone can make a mistake, which is 100% true
personally i do not feel any more qualified to fly a jet at thousands of hours in a ****ty 152 compared to anymore at 250 hours in a ****ty 152, the only thing that will make you feel more comfortable in a jet is by practice in a jet.
if you believe that you need 2000 hours of flight instructin a 152 (thats what it took my old teacher to get hired at in the 80's) before you can be good enough to work for a regional, then you prob shouldnt be flying at all
And I didn't say that thousands of hours in a 152 makes any one qualified to do anything more than fly a 152. The point is that low-time guys (I consider myself to be a low time guy, having been hired at a 121 carrier with just shy of 1000 hours) are no more or less likely to make or catch a mistake than a guy with a bazillion hours in the jet. As I said in my original post: stupid mistakes can and do happen to anyone. But I am willing to bet a guy who has been around a while would be less baffled about how to configure the bleeds or running a checklist and more able to catch a simple error than a guy with wet ink on his commercial certificate.
And as another poster said, after a few hundred hours flying a jet I have come to realize that flying jets is less about being "good enough" and more about being "smart enough". If you have a fairly narrow knowledge base (ie lack of experience that comes from only a year or two of flying with a narrow range of experiences) then you have a significant disadvantage when it comes to being "smart enough".