Originally Posted by forgot to bid

Maybe the FAA just thinks the more money is spent is indicative of the quality of training? For the life of me, what does a dispatcher have to do with sim training? The type of scenario based training that a dispatcher and a FA should be involved with have nothing to do with the type of training that should be conducted in a simulator. Simulators should be relegated to flight training.

Training to me is the issue that needs to be addressed but for the life of me I don't see how this helps the situation. In an ideal world the Feds would put so much pressure on in-house training programs so as to ensure they don't pass pilots who are inept and not qualified for the job. But this would require good Feds overseeing every airline and in my past experience that is not always the case.

Sometimes you get POI's who are not competent to fly any airplane much less the ones they're assigned to oversee. Some have poor records of passing while others have bizzare attitudes related to failures. There was a Fed assigned to Coex's 1900D program that thought failing would make a pilot better and failed them for almost no reason at all. When the 1900Ds were parked this Fed went on to fail over and over again in training for the ERJ-145. Any regular new hire would've been fired but he had the opportunity to keep trying until he passed?!? He is probably still in the system somewhere as he has the inherent protections of a government job.

People lament about the 1500 hour rule but to me you can have pilots hired by an airline with 1500 hours and an ATP that should not be touching any airplane much less an airliner. After all every PIC that has pilot error'ed an airliner into the ground had > 1500 hours and an ATP.

The problem rests in training and initial and recurrent quals and the responsibility to ensure that standards are uniformly applied AND met rests squarely in the lap of the FAA. And if this is an indication of where they're headed then it's clear that some of the decision makers are simply not up to the challenge of this industry.

Money is not the solution.