Originally Posted by
TurboDog
Well, he said that this is one of the main issues they are having problems with. A 3 year grace period does pretty much nothing. I pilot can literally build over 3000 hour of flight time in 3 years. So I think they are trying to get to a point where if a guy only needs a few hundred hours and he has flown with them already for a few hundred in the 121 environment, then they will give that guy a grace period to get up to the new standard. However, if a guy got hired with 300 hours TT and got up to 500 hours TT before he was furloughed, then that guy would have to go get the experience elsewhere and then come back with preferential hiring and obviously a re-evaluation of his/her skills. He is 1000 hours away from meeting the standard.
It sounds like they don't want the public to view this "grace period" as a period of time that an inexperienced pilot can learn and gain experience. They want the public to be assured that the pilots are well qualified for their jobs.
Think about this for a moment. If part 135 has always required at Min. 1200 TT for VFR and 1500 for IFR, then why has the FAA been allowing pilots with as little as 300 TT behind the controls of Turboprop or Jet. Granted there isn't any part 121 Single pilot ops, but even part 121 at some place like Colgan you could be a PIC of a commercial airliner with 1000TT.
I must be having a bad day because I'm still a bit hazy on this issue. I guess it doesn't really matter how I see it, just how the FAA implements it. Having said that, I understood the language to mean a pilot, like me for instance, could be hired tomorrow with 1300 hours and meet the rule as long as the ATP minimums were met when the three year window closed.
I guess I was under the impression the three year grace period was provided in order to allow the airlines to bring their pilot groups, both current and soon to be hired, into accordance with the law. Since the three years was mentioned, it would seem odd to have an immediate implementation of the law. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it's just I don't see anyone else mentioning that as the case.
I was reading an article on allatps.com where Kit Darby, an aviation consulatant, mentioned the law would take three years to fully implement. He and I could be very wrong though.