That happened at multiple airlines (majors) around the 1960's. It was also a very different era from a safety perspective. Most of those noob also got to fly the panel for a while too, for whatever that's worth.

Yes that's the issue. For both colgan and Atlas the issue wasn't so much lack of info (there was some of that) but lack of willpower on the part of the airlines. IIRC for one motive or another the airlines pushed them through despite both previously documented and observed deficiencies.

He spent a lot of those 618 hours at GIA, so pay-to-play seat meat.

Very entrepreneurial of GIA... turned seat 0F into a revenue seat.

Hard agree. Low total time and low quality of hours

We had a bunch of thisev’63-‘66-ish hires ar EA. All over the lot—great to awful, mostly mediocre but could do the job if things went well. I had a A Hyd failure on a 727, cappy proud to be hired with Luscombe time. Didn’t go smoothly, let’s say that.

Agreed.

Even with boom time hiring, the reality is "great job, lousy career, terrible investment."

If unions can stop wage concessions, please explain why a widebody CA makes only 65% of the purchasing power they had in 1980? Please explain why regional pilots ended up on food stamps and public assistance after 20+ years of concessionary negotiating after deregulation? Oh, and if you look at wage charts alongside new hire experience level you’ll see that as they reduced pay, working conditions and benefits, they continually were forced to hire less and less qualified applicants. They drove people away from wanting to become pilots. They created their own pilot shortage.
point being, anybody thinking a union can prevent concessions over the long term hasn’t been paying attention. They pay what they have to to keep seats filled.

Reading this thread feels like (pre covid inflation) car dealerships where they added some made up Market adjustment price on top of the MSRP/Sticker price and then refused to even talk about Invoice or sticker price.
This sonic guy is not even in the ball park. He's started with an end result and continues to argue to that end, facts be damned.

Arguing with some folks is like wrestling with a pig in mud, eventually you realize that the pig just wants to get dirty.

So you're saying the unions are impotent?

You are probably comparing straight hourly wages without any consideration toward soft money generated by all the work rule changes. A widebody CA in 1980 earning 120,000 a year would need to make 420,000 a year now. That’s easily done at Delta and I suspect American and United. In fact at Delta that’s probably well below the average Widebody CA pay. It’s not difficult to crack 600,000 and some pilots have exceeded 900,000 in a year. If you compare it to 2019 when the current round of contracts got put on ice by covid we were solidly ahead of inflation.