Originally Posted by
upndsky
...
I'd rather have someone in the right seat with 750 hours of quality, hard-IMC, four-seasons, high-density airport experience and a Commerical certificate than a 1,500-hour C-172 wonder with an ATP.
...the jobs where you can cut your teeth...are all going away.
So I guess the question remains...how do you get that experience?
Military pilots sure as hell aren't going to go to a regional and sit right seat for $20k/yr. Mainline guys will do it if furloughed, but not many of them. Besides the problem rears its ugly head when times are good and pilots are hard to come by...resulting in so-called pilot mills. I'm not talking about universities, either. I'm talking about the "GO FROM ZERO TIME TO RIGHT SEAT IN 6 MONTHS!!!" places.
That's about as close to no experience as you can get. Airlines are getting away with filling the pilot shortage with pilots who have never scared the crap out of themselves.
So, how do we get them to scare the crap out of themselves?
Well, for one, require them to fly for a bit with that brand new wet commercial. If we made ATP mins a requirement for the 121 world, that would at least make it cost-prohibitive (to most) to buy your time and sit with an instructor who will make the decisions for you. It would therefore force the majority of people to take that wet commercial and go find a job, where, as with any flying job, they will be forced with these types of tough decisions on a daily basis. Or, god-forbid, they will have to continue their training through their CFI and get their experience by keeping their students from killing them.
But, will even these types of flying fully prepare you for an airline? In a word...no.
The airline industry forces you to fly on a daily basis in and around weather that there are very limited ways to experience before you get there (not to mention in aircraft that are much more capable and powerful than most will have experienced). How many 121 pilots out there can say they de-iced an aircraft or referenced their speed via Mach number before they entered the 121 world? Sure, a few did. But I'd be willing to bet that most didn't.
Is that wrong? No. As long as you are trained well and are paired with experienced captains who can walk you through these types of situations the first time you encounter them, then you will be fine. Which brings up another issue...
6-Month upgrades. What?
You mean a regional pilot can upgrade to captain and still never had to fly in icing conditions or reference the holdover tables? I think that, at the very least, a person needs to have at least 40 or 50 hours of 121 experience in every month of the year before they can upgrade to Captain. (I'm probably going to catch a little flak from that from people who upgraded in 6 months.) That way they will have at least experienced the gambit of weather (from storms to wind to icing and blizzards). I'm guessing the fast upgrade will be a rather large problem (again) at the regional level once age-65 catches back up. But it is certainly an issue that needs to be resolved.
There are many more issues (training, our current seniority system of "pairing newbees on the worst trips" as Shoreguy put it, etc., etc.) that are coming to light due to this Colgan accident, and it seems to be a bright enough light that the cockroaches have nowhere to go.
Hopefully some changes (a lot of them overdue) will be coming as a result of this investigations. Will we like them? Some of them...yes. Some of them...no. Will those changes make our industry safer? Time will tell.
But airline experience is exactly that...airline experience. You can't gain it from sitting in a sim or studying in a classroom. You can't get it from instructing or flying freight in a 210 (even though flying freight in a high-performance twin is about as close as you can get). The 121 world is a whole 'nother ballgame. You can't get airline experience until you're right there in the action, sitting on the right side of the plane, with passengers strapped in behind you counting on you and your Captain to make the right string of decisions to get them to their destination safely.
Is that ok? Sure, as I said before, though: As long as your 121 training was good and you are paired with experienced check airmen during IOE or with experienced captains the first time you encounter serious icing or take off in snow, then the system works.
As others have pointed out, there are a number of issues that need attention when it comes to gaining that all-so-elusive "experience". Can it be solved like an accident can by "breaking a link in the chain"? I'm not so sure it can, but a big link for me would be starting with the fast upgrade.
~ksuav8r