It was enacted during the Obama administration, but was an FAA regulation in the works for years prior under pressure from Congress. Being an FAA reg, I didn’t require his signature.

I never said otherwise.

Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses!

here’s how it went:

and that is completely untrue.

We hired pilots with 1500 hours that we turned down at 500, but now with an extra 1000 hours of reinforcing bad habits. The training footprint and performance records support that.

I believe in higher mins, the challenge is to attract quality, motivated pilots in the industry, and that will mean some kind of affordable pathway.

Semantics, I never implied that I was talking about a theoretical libertian free market, no such thing exists at the marco scale in the world today, and everybody knows what I meant.

in a libertarian fantasy free market, or any other you wish to define, wages won’t keep up with inflation.

the idea that they will is borne of libertarian claptrap, whether you advocate for a libertarian free market or not.

Nobody said it was perfect, and it costs money to do better. The regionals squeaked through the last growth spurt without any fatalities (well OK one in AK, but they have different rules in practice if not in theory). So everything is hunky-dory, no action required. No blood, no sense of urgency.

Wasn’t the era of regionals hiring at 250-500 hours pretty short lived and also not every regional was doing that?

Regardless, the 1500 hour rule has seemed to provide a weird mix of positives and negatives. Pay improved drastically but the crunch on labor availability it caused has also meant that quality of applicants has not necessarily gone up.

Prior to about the turn of the century competitive mins were always around 1000-2500TT / 300-500 ME. Than came the RJ boom, and even then some regionals stuck to 1000 minimum.

Well it fixed one problem but didn't fix other problems... the regionals would still be hiring low quality applicants without the ATP rule, they'd just have fewer hours. All applicants improve at least a little between 200 and 1500 hours, and most gain significant improvement, in judgement if nothing else.