There is an excellent article in the May 2015 issue of Flying Magazine r.e. having some experience before flying for the airlines. The author points out how inexperience at date of hire has led to some of the recent accidents.

Now...what's the cure?

How does one get 'experience'? It's the age old dilemma, You can't get a flying job without experience, but you can't get flying experience without a job.

With so few students entering the pipeline, there just aren't that many instructing jobs, and cancelled check flying has been replaced by online banking. Even the military won't be pumping out as many pilots, as the Drones start taking over the fighter/bomber missions.

He makes an excellent point that the new 1500 hour ATP rule only applies to the US Airlines, now take a look at the MPL for foreign carriers.

60 hours and in the right seat of an airliner??

Another good point he made is, even if you had a lot of experience when you were hired, in normal day to day airline ops, we are in the center of the envelope, not at the edges, and we rarely have to use our finely honed skills...so they atrophy.

I know when I had a Cub, my 'excuse' for paying for it was to keep my stick and rudder skills up to snuff. Then my company cut my pay 42% and I couldn't afford it any more, oh, and gas went to $5/gallon.

So...anyone want to go fractional on a Pitts S2B?

 

Honestly, I do love the fact that the 1500hr rule is raising pay, but it has nothing to do with safety. Higher pay allows you to attract better candidates, and that is what is needed. I have noticed that a pilot's skill is based on the person, and not so much their experience. Although, I'm not discounting that experience is a good thing, but the person must be capable of learning from, and applying that experience.

I've always said on here, pay is what makes an airline safe. The best candidates were hired when the airline had the best contract. There is probably loads of data that backs up that statement.

 

Timbo,

Come on back to the Dog. You work on your stick and rudder skills 3-4 times per day 14-16 days per month

 

You could "manufacture" a great deal of experience through sims. LOFT does just that, but it would be expensive and time consuming and who's going to pay for that? However, it is a lot cheaper than bent metal and regs written in blood. Everything I've seen at the regionals is done at the bare minimum, so the FAA must raise bare minimum requirements. Increase the length of training and include more real world decision making scenarios in both initial and upgrade training. Not all of these need to be in a sim. They can be in classroom or in a FTD.

I think Comair used to do unusual attitude training. That should be mandatory. I know the cadets at some of the foreign airlines even get a little aerobatic experience as well.

 

You wouldn't go have heart surgery with a surgeon who has taken 3 months worth of medical classes. And thats part of why they're paid well, it takes a long time to get the education and ability to perform that job well and it is a serious profession.

Being an airline pilot is very similar. It is all simply a supply and demand problem, but everyone out there is trying to think of ways to make it work while ignoring that. You can't just bend the supply and demand model to fit your situation without breaking it (such as putting inexperienced pilots in cockpits).

Our job is one which requires lots of training and lots of experience. And it should be paid accordingly. And now that we have tools in place (such as the ATP requirement) to try to ensure that that training and experience is there, the supply and demand model is going to have an impact on the pay we receive.

 

How about working something like this into a recurrent now and again? No autopilot, no flight directors, no autothrottles, and most importantly no jeopardy.

 

I couldn't disagree more. Were you a Capt around 2006-2008? Thats when we were scrapping the bottom of the barrel and hiring kids right out of high school with 250 hours or the recent college grads who only had 300 hours. The difference was night and day in how they performed as compared to the traditional 1000-1500 hour CFIs that we had traditionally hired over the years. I'm just curious if you had to fly with that group of low timers as a captain?

 

Ask and so you shall receive.

 

We used to train our IFR students in an Archer following these profiles.

A lot of the approaches we fly in Mexico require similar skills, descending turns or arcs with config changes using an RMI. We used to get these on LOFTs. The key thing is time is money. Regionals have neither.

 

Yes, I was a captain then. I never had a problem with any of the low time pilots. The ones I had issues with were the mid career change pilots who were high time 135/91. There were maturity issues, but that had to do with the individual, not their experience level. The worst pilot I ever flew with was a military pilot who just flew however, and didn't listen to a word you said.