In today's market I would say you have about a 0% chance of getting hired at a major without prior 121 experience. Even with a large amount of 121 time your chances are still slim without internal references.

Now, that being said, I think that the 300 hour FO isn't really a great idea. You can teach a guy procedures, but you can't teach experience. When I say experience I am talking about things such as judgement and the ability to think outside the box when the time calls for it. These are things that sitting in the right seat as a CFI will teach you. I truly do believe that teaching will make you a better, more well rounded pilot. Obviously these guys that go through programs such as MAPD make it in their careers, but I think that it is unfair to ask a captain to help bridge the experience gaps with these guys while you are flying around paying passengers.

Just my two cents on the matter....

 

Yes, but you have to understand that a military pilot isnt just a pilot. Before he/she stepped foot in a T-37, they aleady had at least four years of intense leadership training and how to make decisions in stressful situations. Also, the selection process for military pilots is totally differant from civilians. military pilots are military officers and the selection to be a military officer first and foremost is very selective. So, the military starts off with a certain type of individual and trains that person to fly very sophisticated aircraft (not 172's) from the get go.

 

IMHO, mil officers and mil pilots run the full spectrum. Some are brilliant and some are idiots. Some have hands of gold, others have hands of stone. Some have no SA, and some fly in a state of zen.

A good teacher can help make good pilots. Mil pilots have more opportunties to make overly firm landings and no one besides the crew and chiropractor(sp?) cares. Pax care and capts may not want to teach.

I am not sure if there was a point in there or not.

 

What have you learned? Will your part 91, 61 or 141 experience help you in the airlines? Will the cross wind procedures you learn and teach be of service to you in bigger planes? Will short and soft field training help in any way to fly a cat III approach? In my experience the two worlds of aviation are so different that more time in smaller planes only helps to pollute your mind with data rules and procedures that are not only useless in most other places in aviation but often are contradictory.

I say if you want to be an airline pilot and you have an opportunity to go and do it without having to go through the CFI thing then they should go for it. I have only witnessed good that comes from it. I am sure that their first few captains might grumble a little but they will do that with a 1000 hour arrogant CFI as well. There are few benefits to suffering with the CFI thing and when you reach the next level you will struggle with having to unlearn most of what you so diligently acquired.

SkyHigh

 

????

Low-time FO's who can't do a basic X-wind landing technique are a scraped wing-tip (or worse) waiting to happen. We actually do land with 20+ kt crosswinds in the regional world...

And short-field techniques come in handy all the time...especially when the flaps fail at SBA, and you don't have the fuel to F- around with the marine layer at LAX! BTDT.

I will have to admit that I have never done a soft-field landing in a jet.

 

I was under the impression flying any maneuver was about being in control and flying the plane instead of just going along for the ride.


-LAFF

 

What I was referring to was the fact that bigger planes use different techniques than smaller ones do. How is a few hundred hours of ground reference maneuvers going to help a pilot in the airline world? A CFI mostly sits there with his/her hands in their lap while someone else does the flying anyway. A better path would be to skip those wasted years and learn directly from a seasoned pilot such as yourself.

SkyHigh

 

In a jetliner you are along for the ride. Whenever presented with a challenge your job is to regurgitate procedures, information and tasks then load it all into the computer or flight director. The closer you can come to acting like an automaton the better.

To complicate matters you have to run everything through a co-worker voicing every thought and intention and often motivating them to preform the task for you since your hands are resting upon the autopilot driven yoke.

Very little independent thought is required just manual driven decisions and procedures. True pilot skill is secondary to ones ability to follow the manual and become a cog in the system.

In training one gets the opportunity to do some real hand flying but on the line that stuff goes away.


SKyHigh

 

I don't like your candor on this matter. It confuses me. Are you serious?
Would others please speak - up and tell what life on the line is like.

-LAFF

 

I am sure that others would like to inject some self created drama but that is exactly what it is like. Your job as an airline pilot is to accurately reflect the manual and to direct the aircraft through computer inputs. The autopilot is on 96% of the time and can do a better job than you. In the sim pilots are encouraged to have it on through most of training. A few steep turns are thrown in for old time sake but the rest is AP. Your goal is to remain very tightly centered inside the box. No heroics or creative thought required.

When you take a Cessna 172 up for a flight you truly are "the pilot in command". You are responsible for every minute decision and action. You don't have a dispatcher or ground crew to guide you, there is no AP most of the time. It is very satisfying to be in control of what you do and the results are your own.

As an airline captain you review and enact the decisions that others have made. As an FO you are a superfluous system in the flight deck almost completely unnecessary and idle most of the time. There to serve as a back up should the primary go down. The company loves to create busy work for the FO but really their highest function is to serve as a voice activated interface between the captain and autopilot.

Airline pilots have very little control and input into anything. Some might think they are accomplishing something significant but we already know that pilots are a little delusional.

SkyHigh