Originally Posted by
jayray2
The argument is that people that are truly smart are either not becoming pilots and/or are leaving the industry. This as a result has lowered the standards and experience required to get a job. If you paid more you would attract more people and could better screen pilots. This is the argument at least.
As to this idle charter below 10,000, they were breaking cockpit procedures but I see no way this played any part in the accident. The charter stopped a few minutes before everything hit the fan.
Unless I missed something, the FAA sets the standards on who gets to fly. The tests are objective, and everyone must go through the same hoops.
The "argument" that current work conditions are discouraging more generally desirable candidates may have merit, but this tragic incident has little or nothing to bolster it. In the eyes of the FAA, these two pilots (whatever their other faults) were fully qualified and had to go through some very specific and demanding training hurdles.
If this incident does bolster this "argument" in a peripheral fashion, the only NTSB recommendation I could see coming out of it would be for the FAA to make the barriers to entry and retention even more stringent (health, age, training qualification, tighter parameters and "wildcard" scenarios on checkrides, etc.).
I suspect pilot labor groups would strenuously object to harder checkrides that offer more realistic evaluations of pilot skill and judgment. The "canned" checkride is very much the career aviator's friend, particularly as the years go by.
Alternately, the FAA could institute a "2 strikes and you're out" policy. Two failed training events in the course of a career and that's the end of your flying (because a pattern has been established). This is a regulatory way to "weed-out" weak but technically proficient pilots and has the virtue of being objective and "fair". But man oh man . . . talk about checkride-itis!
(IMHO.)