Originally Posted by
CaptainTeezy
Ok...first off the Captain missed a very important aspect to his career...being a CFI.
For those of you that say that the FO was a CFI so that doesnt make sense...here is why you are wrong.
1. In this economic climate the FO HAD to instruct that long to get a job interview. Who knows if she took the CFI experience seriously or not. There are TONS of CFIs out there that instruct but all they want to do is get the shiny jets ASAP and dont really understand what it means to be a CFI.
2. The FO spent her day off skiing, and then used airline travel as rest which we all know you cannot rest on an airliner. This shows a huge lack in good judgement. Since she wasnt "in shape" for her flight she was unable to use her CFI skills to maintain situational awareness to notice something as simple as the airspeed.
By her own words... as a 1600 hour pilot (much of that as a CFI)... she:
a) didn't know what a chip detector is... this is basic turbine engine systems knowledge
b) had hardly flown in "Actual" IMC weather.... which I had gone after aggressively through out my CFII and GA experience.
c) lacked the most fundamental level of aerodynamic knowledge by pulling up flaps during a stall/stall recovery condition thus instantly increasing the effective AOA of the wing and further deepening the stall..
So being a CFI is not a magic bullet, no more than being former Mil (though I'd argue the Mil tends to weed out week pilots better)... in the end, we have a broken system that doesn't grade skill/knowledge and we use the crutch of "FAA Certified" to mean the same thing as "pinnacle of his profession" when describing a pilots qualifications.
Keep in mind, in the same economic environment where she was being hired into the right seat of a state of the art large FAR 121 turbo prop... there were more then 3000 laid off airline pilots from the majors or smaller National airlines with 1000s of hours of FAR 121 experience... But for $22/hr.. most of them weren't even considering this company for employment.
You get what you pay for.