Originally Posted by
Romulus
It isn't a perfect solution, but it isn't as useless as you make it out to be. Almost tripling the number of hours of a pilot is very helpful even if it still leaves much to be desired.
A 300 hour wonder has little, if any, flying experience outside of an instructional environment. They will have to fly for about a year somewhere to gain that experience and this will improve them as pilots.
If you believe this was done because airline management was concerned about safety over profit rather than because flight times were used as a means to cut down the number of applications, then you've misunderstood the history of the situation.
I did 8 years at the regional airlines and flew as an LCA and chatted often with friends involved in the hiring process where we were proud to have a 1000 hour minimum where most people were actually hired with well above that because the "pilots" who did the hiring believed in experience when it came to safety. These same guys who hired didn't want to be giving "basic instruction" at work everyday.
So I actually believe that back in the 90's and before, safety was a concern when you where hiring pilots who would be flying turboprops into nasty weather day in and day out with a good chance of upgrading to captain in 2 years or less. That along with a larger pool of applicants created an environment which correlated experience to safety.
The advent of the RJ and fully automated aircraft created a belief that the day to day flying was safer anyway and a deterioration of pay and benefits at the major level created the shortage of guys who were willing to work for 18K a year. So the choice for the airlines was to either increase pay to compensate and attract pilots with quadruple digit experience or continue to lower the mins to commercial standards and virtually take pilots out of the hiring process by shoving this down their throats (no pilots I know were in favor of this drop in experience). We know what happened with that story and now we are seeing the results of that decision in the safety standards of some of these poorly run airlines. I predicted in the early part of the decade that this would come back to bite the industry and now we are seeing congress take action to change something that the FAA should have been all over in the beginning. I think my grasp of the matter is actually pretty good, I just think that they should make the requirement to be ATP minimum and not compromise on the original proposal the house put out. Of course 800 hours is better than 250, but it can be better; I really don't know what your point was.