They were "Hired" with less than 1500hrs. That's the point. It has something to do with pre-airline experience. How many times did you do something when you were tooling around in your 172 and went, "whoa, that was pretty scary"? The best part of that is the much more forgiving environment such as the training aircraft. What the guys from colgan did, any pilot could have done, and probably did do at one point in their flight training. Not in a transport category aircraft. Screw up, scare yourself, and learn from it. But do it all BEFORE you get to the airliners with a bunch of meat in the back. Seems pretty rational to me.