Originally Posted by
2StgTurbine
[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana]
Gaining experience in icing conditions, and understanding all the characteristics and factors of stalls is something pilots develop in the first 1500 hours. Before the FAA wants you to be responsible for the lives of 10-300 of the general public, they want you to have a good foundation of airmanship. They want you to spend 1500 hours teaching students stall recoveries and having to recover the aircraft when the student accidentally spins it. They want you to experience icing while flying cargo or charter. They want you to develop your piloting skills while risking the lives of only a relatively small amount of other people.
You might think that you are ready to act as an FO after you pass your commercial checkride, but you are not. Sure you can recover from a stall, complete an engine failure checklist, and fly an approach down to minimums, but those are only simulations of what you will be expected to do. You are not going to ever stall an aircraft after you reach a safe altitude, clear the area of traffic, and willingly stall the aircraft. In the real world, you are tired, the weather is bad, and you are busy studying the approach plate. While you are thinking about the taxi into the gate, you notice a buffet. So far in your life the only time you experienced that was when you were purposefully making the aircraft stall. What happens when you look at your airspeed indicator and it is well above the stall speed? How long will it take you to believe the aircraft is stalling? What happens when your crewmember recovers incorrectly by lifting up that flaps before you reduce the angle of attack and gain more airspeed? If you had 1500 hours of instructing or charter experience, you would have gone over stall recoveries so many times that you say them in your sleep. You experienced so many students pushing the wrong button or pulling the wrong lever that you developed the ability to slap someone’s hand the instant they try to do something wrong. If you had 1500 hours of 135 time, you would have likely experienced icing in small planes and learned when to expect it, how the aircraft will respond, and to respect it. If you do not have these experiences, you are not ready to be in the cockpit of an aircraft flying a demanding schedule for long hours with dozens of people.
It is the equivalent of someone getting a business degree and claiming that they are qualified to run General Electric. Sure you might have done great in training and plenty of others with the same experience have done it before, but that does not mean you are ready or that they were. Before you are the CEO of a national company, you start out as the manager at a small company, or maybe you start your own. The point is, start small so that your mistakes are small. If you really are a professional, getting another 1200 hours should not be too difficult.
This is an excellent post. I really appreciate the thought and time you put into it. Many other posts on this subject here seem to say in essence "you need a lot of hours because they were required of me," but yours actually explains why experience matters.
Thanks!