Originally Posted by
forgot to bid
Alright, I started flying in the airlines at 22 with 1600 hours, all civilian and most all of that as a CFI, keep that in mind in case you think I'm just defending the 190 hour wonderpilot.
I think there still needs to be an airline certification board, whether totally private or government endorsed.
At this point I don't care if the ATP becomes the Part 121 minimum, what I do care about is who will be around when hiring picks up and I personally find a 2-day crash course ATP ride in a Seminole to be worthless. You should've been able to fly a Seminole to ATP standards when you got your mutli or your training and checkride were substandard.
And I think you should be able to, and I don't know if the bill reads this way, to get your ATP on your initial ride at a 121 carrier because you're on a checkride that is at ATP standards.
To date, after getting a E145 PIC type, multiple recurrents, multiple line checks, 756 PIC type, MD88 SIC type and so forth nothing, nothing, nothing compares to how difficult they made my check out on the E120 as a new hire Coex pilot. Its all on how the training is done and that is the responsibility of the FAA. It should be far more standard then it is.
forgot to bid, nice post.
You got it when you wrote. "Its all on how the training is done and that is the responsibility of the FAA".
The FAA allows the "Santa Claus" DE's that pass anyone from their bread and butter flight school. The FAA has changed the PTS to de-emphasis basic stick and rudder skills. Etc, etc, etc.
I wrote this last year in a thread dealing with the Colgan Q400 crash, and it has since been validated by the NTSB, - the Captain didn't know how to recover from a stall. It was that simple. Yet the Captain was fully certified by the FAA as an Airline Transport Pilot. His career progression was apparently this: (even if my memory is not exact regarding the Colgan Captain, in a generic sense, it covers many professional pilots who have started out over the past 15 years) He entered the private to commercial program at Gulfstream, then bought into the B1900 SIC program at Gulfstream, then made Captain at Gulfstream, then bought a job at Pinnacle/Colgan. All things considered, he should have been a better pilot than I was when I entered the airline pilot world 20 years ago with 1000 hours of single engine CFI time and 200 multi. After all, his training emphasized airline procedures from day one. Mine started out at the FBO before entering a junior college flight program that was NOT a pipeline to a specific airline.
Somewhere along the way, I learned how to actually recover from a stall. Mr. Renslow learned how to recover from an approach to stall. When he encountered a real stall, he was obviously not prepared. RIP to him, his crew and passengers. No pun intended.
All along the way, the FAA blessed the programs that put him in that cockpit.