Hiring Mins 40 years ago!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 

You know there is a lot of talk on here about the industry going to hell because they are hiring people with 600 hrs total time etc.................... Well some of you people seem to forget that United used to have ads in the newspapers....................Do you have 250hrs and a Commercial Pilots license??????????????? Come be an airline pilot. Whats the difference you ask????????????? The airplanes are safer now and the training has improved greatly so get off the whole, "oh my god a 600hr wonder kid" :mad:



PS I said 20 yrs ago I didnt realize how old I was so lets make it more like 40 or so years ago :)

20 Years Ago
 

I have made metion of this several times before. It use to be common to get hired at the majors in your late 20's. The advent of the regionals put off the fancy major airline job ten years to never. Also Keep in mind that no one really got hired with those times.

SkyHigh

Got a picture of that ad? I need some moral support here.

Source........???

Hahaha.....um...payback?? :D

Classic, I gotta say ;)

And the low timer could look forward to riding sideways for 10 years or so, then spending another decade or so in the right seat. This doesn't count the inevitable furloughs, some of which were 5 years or more, which may or may not mean anything, depending on what said furloughee did during that time. Bottom line: by the time the "wonder kid" got to the left seat of anything, he was no longer a low timer.

Today, the expectation seems to be that if you meet minimum quals (ATP) you are automatically entitled, qualified, and owed a left seat in a SJ.

By the way, the day of "do you have a pulse? Come be an airline pilot." didn't last long, and in general, real hiring quals were higher than today with most new hires prior to deregulation being military trained.

By the way in Europe they have been hiring people with 500 hrs on the 737 and 320 for generations

That was back in the early 1960's when the payscales were lower, and the the vietnam-era military pilots weren't available.

Back then if you didn't have the dough for college or flight training, most people took their old man's job at the mill/factory/mine. There weren't many alternative means of funding your dreams, so people just faced the reality.

Also, as was mentioned you started as an FE, and stayed an FE for years. FE's never got spectacular pay.

I changed the title of the thread to reflect the OP's attempt to make part of his point more accurate. His thread title of 20 years ago is incorrect as I was personally there to witness it. Saab realised his mistake but didn't fix it.

By the way, Saab. In the future when you make a mistake in the title of a thread, you can go back and change it on your own.

How do I change the title? Thanks for the fix though

The boom years in the 60s were about 1964-1968. The normal requirements for all the Majors were FAA C&I, Hight School Diploma, 20/20 vision, Max age 32, prefer under age 28, not subject to the draft, male.

Examples: I had a student at the FBO I worked at at HPN. He had a class date with UAL. He had zero time. He was part of a special program for people that had a 4 year degree. UAL interviewed, tested, and gave class dates to individuals. They were required to go out and pay for their FAA Commercial and I recall they would get their Instrument at a FBO in Denver just before they started their new hire class. TWA had similar program but required a Private.

Another person I knew was hired by TWA in Feb 64, 500 hrs. TT ASEL, Age 20. Hired as a relief pilot on the B707, told he would probaly have to go to FE because TWA was in the process of putting the PFEs in the pilot seat. Age 24 he was a B727 Captain, age 25 he was a B707 Captain.

I was not that uncommon for a guy with 500 hours to have an offer at two majors at the same time.

Yeah I talked to this one guy, 25 yr old CA on the 747 for TWA:eek: Talk about living the life.............. Hes divorced twice and pretty much broke now, but still................I bet he enjoyed it while it lasted

LUV IT! :eek: :D :eek:

I was hired in Switzerland with 260 hours total time. Standard Operating Procedure in Europe where the flight schools train pilots to become airine pilots from day 1.

Planes are operating safely there. Total time is meaningless. Quality of selection/screening process and quality of training is very meaningful.

Don't misunderstand. Experience is priceless. But there is no reason an airline F/O cannot be hired and trained to be safe and proficient with just a few hundred hours.

yeah..and not one person on this board could pass their written tests..no GLEAM over there..no questions and answers before the test...why do you think they give us the answers...makes u think

Excellent point, by no means this the FAA written an accurate reflection of a person aviation aptitude.

BTW, you have my dream job.

although i do think they have study books now...

"Approximately 15,000 questions representing the totality of the JAA ATPL CQB and covering all 14 JAA ATPL theory tests."

man..15000 questions..that's a lot of memorization...thank goodness for martha king!

She's annoying to watch but she and John do make it easy to pass a test. (PPL, IR and ATP through King Schools) I would bet that she wears the pants in the family. LOL

But I thought the industry has just now been going to $hit.

I beg to differ. At least one person on this board passed those tests..... ;)

all hail saab2000...you da man!

You must be a 600 hr. pilot looking for the "easy way out". Yeah,, the planes are safer and the training is better(probably because of 600 hr. pilot mistakes). They dont teach experience, which is imperative in a pilots situational awareness. Which is the fault in most airplane accidents.

If an airline hires an inexperienced guy thats their business. Just dont tell the passengers.

All pilots have to start some where. Times have not changed just the scope. A regional FO will gain experience from an experienced CA, this has been the way of the airlines world for almost a century now. It's just a bonus that the planes are safer. Don't blow it out of proportion, airlines have been hiring pilots since the 30's with 1000TT or less and upgrading them around 3000TT. Funny how the only thing that changes is technology.

Most airline accidents are caused by low time pilots. NOT!

Anyways, I disagree with you. All the passengers SHOULD know what the experience level is. I want them all to know. I also want them to know how much the crew is paid - not that they care about that. The reality is is that as long as they get their ticket as cheap as possible, they will take the flight - I guarantee that.

I'd be interested in knowing his name. Could it be you were taken in by an urban legend? Anything's possible, I suppose, but that one sounds pretty unlikely.

He's not that far off. My grandpa joined the navy when he was 18, got out around 22-23 and was recruited by TWA. He only had his PPL when he left the navy, so TWA paid for his instrument and commercial. He then became a FE at age 60, and retired at 62 because he was afraid of losing his retirement.

But he was a pilot during the glory days, and loved it.

He stayed in the reserves after he left active duty, and his weekend a month, they basically gave him and his buddy each a plane, and they just did x-countries. There weren't any requirements on them....just log some flight time.

He loved it =)

I must admit that flying a heavy jet over the big puddles around the world is much easier than flying a 30 pax turboprop 9 legs a day in and out of busy terminal areas, yet many of us cut our teeth on that much more demanding and unforgiving commuter type of flying. So I'll step out on a limb here and say its safer to put a sharp low time person in a big jet environment where they fly 1 to 2 legs a day with good FD's, autopilots, FMC etc, than to put them in a high perfomance turboprop with minimal aviaonics flying 8 to 12 legs a day in and out of busy terminal areas.

Like I joke to the folks I fly with, Hey man I actually used to be a pretty decent pilot when I was at the commuters, now I get scared if I have to hand fly a real IMC approach without autothrottles! I remember those days not very long ago hand flying 8 to 12 1800RVR approaches in one day and we used to turn the flight director off because we could fly a better approach without it.

"How do I change the title?"

I would assume you click on it. At JC that works and that's how I can do it here as a mod. It could be the admins have the settings different than JC.

"Total time is meaningless."

"Experience is priceless"

So, which is it?

I disagree with you, which is no surprise, but I agree that planes aren't fall out of the sky in Europe. I'd say it's partly cause of the higher standards in ground training and a more rigorous selection process. That's why it works for the military. The Capts over there must have some pretty interesting "low time F/O" stories to tell as well.

The more experience/flight time the F/O brings to the table, the better. You can best learn by doing.

LOL! I know what you mean. The good old days.

You are right. Those sound contradictory. But experience comes not only through thousands of hours. I have a buddy in Switzerland who has spent most of his career flying MD-11s. It is a lifestyle which undoubtedly has it's own challenges. But I know for a fact that he has twice as many hours as I have, but I have more approaches and landings than he has. By a large number. The flying I do averages about 1 landing per hour. I have about 4000 hours total time now. All but 260 of it in the airline environment.

Who has more experience? Since most of his hours are in cruise at FL350 I don't really think he is learning too much.

Anyway, captains here have low-time F/O stories to tell too. I could tell some of my own! :D I was certainly no hero pilot at 260 hours, I can tell you that. :D But who among us was?

But in Europe it is done a bit differently than in the US. It is very normal for a plane to be vectored to final to fly the ILS, even in CAVU weather. Not too hard for the 260 hour wonder to fly headings, altitudes and speeds with the autopilot and fly the last 2 minutes on the ILS by hand. It is the visual approaches which can screw someone up, and there are few done over there.

I am not here to say that any system is better than the other. But I don't have a problem with low-time pilots per se. The safety comes through judgement and training and of course, experience. But experience alone is not the only thing.

If there were a way to combine the best of the European system with the best of the US ways of doing things it would be very nice. I enjoy the challenges and rewards of both places.

Agree with de727ups with a slight modification. A rigorous selection process, quality training and "depth of experience (not total hours)" are critical to safe operations. Some learn to swim then spend hours in the shallow end of the pool. Others migrate to the deep end and gain more experience. Five hundred hours of single pilot cargo (checks) operations in the weather at night is much more valuable then 1000 hrs flying a light twin on day VFR cross country trips to the Bahamas.

Flight Experience
 

Yes and flight instructing is near totally worthless. What is 1000 hours of touch and goes and ground reference maneuvers supposed to do for a guy? Most of the time a CFI sits with arms folded in the right seat trying not to fall asleep.

I too wish our system was based more upon merit and natural ability than luck and contacts.

SkyHigh

I agree with what you guys have written. It isn't really black and white.

I tend to think that my experience now of operating a CRJ on the east coast from Washington DC to Maine to the north and the Carolinas to the south is the toughest environment in the US. And it is for sure more intense in terms of weather and ATC than it was in Europe.

One thing that is not really directly addressed, but is probably part of the bigger picture, is that it's not the total hours always that reflect 100% of the pilots abilities (although it is the best benchmark we have at the moment). We aren't being hired just for our monkey/stick and rudder skills. We're being hired for our maturity in judgement and problem solving in a high stress, technically complex enviroment. I know low time pilots can fly well, but it's aviation maturity that is truely the heart of the issue.

The military puts 300 hr pilots in 40 million dollar F-18s and shoots them off of a ship at night loaded with bombs to go over enemy territory, then come back and land on a postage stamp. These pilots were chosen because they went through a training weeding out process that demonstrated their ability to function well in this environment before ever getting near an airplane. (I'm not a F18 guy). We don't have this selection process in civil aviation, so we rely on total flight hours and past flying jobs to show we've had some exposure to some stressfull experiences. The bridge programs bypass this. Some guys are sharp at 300 hrs, some aren't. It's a gamble that some of the regionals are willing to take to save money by not paying for higher time pilots. They are flooding the market with lower time pilots which makes it harder to negotiate wages. I hope this doesn't offend anyone... I just know that many low time guys will look back in a few years and realize how much they may have learned between 300 hrs and 1,300 hrs.

As has already been mentioned, this would be great at the entry level, ie rigorous screening. But beyond that a merit-based system would be far too subjective..."merit" would be determined soley by ass-kissing skills.

Sucking up is critically important in the real world, but unlike flying there is still some realistic level of performance assessment. I had a jerk boss who had two operations managers, me and a guy who had been hired because he was friends with my boss. The other OM was useless, but of course he was the bosse's bum-chum. Layoff time came around, and we had to lose one of the two OM's, me or this other guy. I expected to get the ax, but to my shock the boss fired his buddy instead. Turns out the boss KNEW his friend couldn't do jack, and he knew that his OWN job would be in jeoporady if he got rid of the guy who did know how to do the job. In flying, as long as you can pass your PC (not hard with the right instructor), that's the end of objectivity.

Remember back in the day the good routes, good shifts, good airplanes, and upgrades were based on whatever the boss felt like, not seniority. Needless to say there were lots of pilots hanging out in operations to kiss the man's butt.

Still baiting SKYHIGH. That's allright. I love fishing expeditions.

Must respectfully disagree. Flight instruction is often staying awake making sure the student doesn't kill you. It certainly is more then basic maneuvers and landings. We do have CFIIs, MEIs, Sim instructors, etc.

"We all had flight instructors; no one learned by osmosis." Be thankful for their efforts. Their value to aviation will become better know when there is a severe shortage.

Many of us learned more from teaching then we did as students. I'm talking about the classroom and the airplane.

Have absolutely no idea what luck and contacts have to do with flight instruction.

You make contacts sound like a dirty word. It's called networking in the modern day world. What's wrong with it ? It's a way of getting your resume in the front door where abilities and qualifications are checked. These are the people who don't sit around and wait for the job to come to them. I'm sure many construction workers network through friends to find work in your industry.

Teaching
 

Those who can do those who can't flight instruct.

Sure we all need instructors however to what end does teaching turns around point do for a future CRJ pilot? Perhaps CFI's should get paid a similar wage to a regional captain and it should be considered a totally separate career path since really they are two separate professions with little in common.

SkyHigh

Flight Experience
 

The modern airliner is so highly automated that real old fashioned pilot skills are really unnecessary anyway. The only real skills needed are a basic understanding of computers and the ability to rote memorise reactions and information.

Others on this thread have already mentioned that stick and rudder skills fade away once one reached a jetliner anyway. Why not hire them young and set their expectations accordingly? Why subject a Charles Lindberg to a career of automated boredom?

The airline pilots of today are little more than manual programed automatons that regurgitate company approved actions and reactions or follow decision trees and are heavily supported by ATC, dispatch and maintenance control.

A 200 hour enthusiastic lump of clay is perfect for that job.

SkyHigh