As one who was on the abolish side before, now looking back from the post 1500 side the experience really is good to have and just gives you more confidence but I really think a wide range of experience is most effective. Fly in all types of weather. Fly different airplanes. Fly for different bosses. Fly in different airspace. Fly lots of IFR. It all helps build the experience and confidence.

So what do you think the minimums should be? Wet commercial to serve SIC? Leave it up to the Airlines themselves? So the next time they have trouble filling classes, instead of raising wages like they should they just keep lowering the hiring standards until they can?



As another poster already mentioned, the copilot got hired at around 700 hours. Perhaps if she had 1500 hours of experience stalling a 172 20 times a day with students before falling into the automation and routine of the Part 121 world, her first reaction wouldn't have been to retract the flaps when the shaker went off.



If anything, the 1500 rule prevents the Regionals from lowering their hiring standards to dangerous levels just so they can keep paying peanuts to their pilots. That's a very good thing.

A lot of what the "1500 hour rule" did was to make airlines "take back" ATP-level training and certification, rather than going out and doing it in a seminole with a DPE. All of a sudden, most people had to go to the airline to get the CTP course and then took the ATP checkride during their training there. The only deviations issued for the simulators are for weight differences that are "close" and an airline that is already using something that otherwise meets the requirements. Who has these simulators? 142 schools. Who was intended to conduct airline training when the airline didn't have the resources? 142 schools. Yes, there are places out there that offer the course that are not airlines, but by and large, the rule has made the airlines "take back" this level of certification and training.

Tail stall was relevant because that’s the inputs the crew made for recovery. One of the reasons suspected is that there had recently been very extensive training on tail stalls and recoveries due to the Roselawn ATR crash in 1994. Both pilots were actually performing to recent training. The FO by retracting flaps and the CA by pulling aft on the yoke. They were also in icing conditions. It is not that hard to understand how they might have been confused. Now training for tail stalls also highlights understanding the difference in tail stalls and normal stalls.

We appreciate the 1500 hour rule for what it did to our pay and rest regs, but not much else.

But then again, it made the industry starting pay based almost entirely on hiring standards. I'm not sure that's a healthy way of doing things long-term.

The general public thinks our industry is safer because the FO flew a 172 around the pattern 7,000 more times.

My opinion is that a 500 pilot can learn to fly an RJ just as well as a 1500 hour pilot.

The recent changes to allow logging SIC time in aircraft that frankly don’t need SICs will go a long ways toward negating the 1500 hour rule anyway. Exactly how well the major airlines hiring people will react to those changes remains to be seen.

From their perspective, it’s often still about the money. A retired O-6 who has been out of the cockpit for a decade plus and flew A-10s before that is likely every bit the training risk that an ERAU graduate with four years in the regionals is, notwithstanding the UPT the retiree went to when the ERAU guy was in kindergarten.

But the retiree is 46 and the ERAU guy is 26. The military guy would wind up topping out Captain pay the last seven years of his career while the ERAU guy would be at max pay for 27 years. Whose butt will be the cheapest to fill that seat for the next 19 years? Overwhelmingly the retired O-6.

The economics say to keep the younger guys in the lower paying jobs for as long as possible. Yes, every seat is going to have to be filled, but if you can keep the average SENIORITY down ten years, it’s a HUGE savings to payroll and a significant - if not the major - reason that the big airlines have pushed the regional concept.

What other industry allows the pay of their employees to be reset to the apprentice level once or twice in mid career? And it’s the price advantage the new ULCC typically has over its competition, everybody has fairly low seniority. Even if the pay scale looks the same, the company hasn’t been around long enough for anybody to get to the highest levels.

So yeah, Delta would love to hire that 26 year old ERAU graduate with 3200 hours of RJ time, but they’d love it even better to hire him when he’s 45.

+1

Typically this is why most regional airlines don't want people to stick around too long.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the legislation solely due to the fact that it forced the regionals to upgrade the QOL offered as a result market forces.

What I think is wrong is that the crash that triggered these reforms was mainly blamed on lack of experience. The general public seen it this way. Facts as in logbook hours refute this claim. Nobody will ever know, but I would contest the actions they took were caused by far more negative variables due to what the industry forced on them and lack of experience was not one. But, non-pilots or people with no 121 won’t see this side of things.

At that time I was just a CFI and didn’t really know much about the airline industry. But now as I’m part of it, maybe the more ethical reform (because lawmakers care about ethics.....) I would have been looking for is a law that protects passengers and employees from airlines being able to outsource any type of work. That would be more just.

The new rest rules made sense.

The 1500 hour rule was nothing more than a political gift to the unions by Obama.

And in many ways the new 1500 hour rule actually made us less safe since the regionals have been desperate to hire anyone who walked in the door by artificially limiting the supply of FOs.

Versus the regionals being desperate anyways because there would still be a shortage of pilots. And instead of hiring pilots who have been forced to gain experience doing any flying, they send people who have never flown a plane before to a pilot mill who has hand selected favorable DPEs. They then stuff them through training and checkrides whether they are ready or not, all in the name of keeping labor cheap. This is a far worse scenario for a safety.