Regional airlines want to axe 1500 hour rule
 

https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-...L7mbCFjcHI-ODk

Do you think repealing or reducing the hours required would affect safety all other factors aside?

Regional airlines want to axe 1500 hour rule
 

https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-...L7mbCFjcHI-ODk

Do you think repealing or reducing the hours required would affect safety all other factors aside?

Does another 1000 hours in a 172 prepare one better to fly an RJ? All experience is valuable, but probably not. I don't really see an issue with a 250 hour guy sitting in the right seat learning from experienced captains. As long as the captains are experienced...

if the airlines want to put the money into ab initio or something close to it, they can turn out a decent product

But the ship has sailed. The problem now isn’t hiring FO’s, it’s retention of captains. The captains/LCA’s are gone and a bunch of 500hr riddle rats will not fix things unless congress lets them start in 2019

They do that overseas and they get computer programmers who seem to have trouble actually flying an airplane if God-forbid they should ever have to do that. How many airliners have crashed overseas in the last decade? How many here in the US (we account for a disproportionate share of total world-wide flying).

Military comes closest, but their screening is rigorous and their training is unforgiving. Even then, the ones who fly solo have ejection seats, and they use them on a regular basis.

An FO's *primary* role (once off IOE) is to be a backup PIC, not an apprentice getting OJT.

Fortunately the colgan families don't seem inclined to let this one go easily, so I doubt any lobbying will stand up to political and media scrutiny.

if the airlines want to put the money into ab initio or something close to it, they can turn out a decent product

But the ship has sailed. The problem now isn’t hiring FO’s, it’s retention of captains. The captains/LCA’s are gone and a bunch of 500hr riddle rats will not fix things unless congress lets them start in 2019

After you finish training you can get 1000 hours as a CFI in a year. Is that really so much to ask?

As a CFI hours 250-800 were extremely valuable and very humbling. I believe PIC time even in a GA plane for the first few hundred hours teaches a lot of lessons. Now that’s being a CFI but I would think even day VFR flying for fun wouldn’t be as valuable but still a learning experience. If it were personally up to me, which it’s not, I would make it 800-1000 hours required with more multi, instrument and instrument approaches logged. Even the approaches it would be a certain amount of precision and non precision approaches, missed approaches etc. The multi required around 100-150, close to 100 actual instrument or at least operating on an IFR flight plan.

I say that because hours 800-1500 even doing all levels from private through teaching CFI students I don’t think there was any significant increase in experience or knowledge. I didn’t feel ready at 250 but I felt about the same at 800 and 1500 in terms of readiness.

Can’t disagree with everything you say.
However….
When the ‘1500’ rule was nothing but a proposal requesting comments from the public I wrote a 4-page argument as to why they shouldn’t adopt it.
Lack of airmanship and lack of common sense caused that crash. Not being handed the keys at 250 hrs.
I still believe that given the right type of structured training aka airline academy style it shouldn’t be a problem.
A sloppy seconds Part 61 CPL/CFI? Yeah no chance.
I’ve got a cosmic amount of dual given and I’ll be the first to tell you that a CFI plateaus just as much as anyone else.
You just get better at anticipating problems.
Now I do think you plateau in your second year as CFI so that will put you around the 1000-1200 hr mark.
Then again it’s all how you fill in those hours:
How much instrument instruction, how much multi, how much IMC, how much night, how much in busy airspace?

Wouldn’t be hard to do a 1500 reduction rubric. 1 hour for every hour turbine. 1 hour for every hour over 6,000 lbs. 1 hour for every hour 135. Max 2 hours extra credit per hour of flight time, max reduction 750 hours.