Originally Posted by
JetJock16
airline careers are no longer attractive to the best and the brightest."
Look at the hiring practices of regional 23 years ago and you’ll see flight times comparable to the FO’s.
Look at the hiring practices at the Majors ~ 45 years ago, many had 250-hours-and-a-commercial, although they were often getting the engineer seat of a Constellation or an Electra.
Originally Posted by
JetJock16
I completely agree that an ATP should be a min requirement to obtain an airline pilot job.
For the copilots? I DISAGREE. How about some experience?
I would propose instead that the Congress or DOT/FAA pass rules/regulations requiring that ALL passenger flights by (for instance) Continental be operated by aircraft on the Continental Airlines FAR 121 Air Carrier Operating Certificate, and all pilots of said aircraft are full employees on the Continental Airlines seniority list, rather than the current practice of defrauding the public with look-alike "Continental" colors and paintjobs. That would require the same training, and non-whipsawed pay.
The flights would be more expensive, but the race to the bottom could stop. Requiring an ATP is simply a distracting ruse to "fix the problem",
to get attention diverted from the central problem: regional airlines, with low pay and crappy work rules, posing as "part of" the major airlines, driving the profession down with what are really (in effect) "alter-ego" airlines.
Having an ATP wouldn't fix anything. It would just be eyewash, like the TSA song-and-dance at the terminal.
This is the
very point of debate that should precipitate the change that is required to provide all those experienced pilots at the regionals with the good schedules and pay by requiring a passenger airline holding out to the public
to fly only under their own name. If I buy a ticket from LAX to LRD on Continental, it should be flown by Continental pilots, If they want to use a Q400, fine, it should be flown by Continental pilots.
But the crash has drawn
attention to the problem, and now is the time to straighten out what should never have happened in the first place, when pilots at the majors were too good to fly a CE-402. How and if any purchase and/or integration would happen is a whole other problem. But once the Federal rule is promulgated, movement and change would happen, and lots of opportunity would occur. This is not to say that ExpressJet, or SkyWest, or even Colgan is unsafe because they are regional airlines, but to disallow the "outsourcing" dodge ("loose" scope) the major airlines have been allowed (by unions!) to use for so long. Have Congress define scope and everything else will follow.