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.

Nah. Let's keep it at 1500. There's already enough carveouts. Let them pay more.

Welcome back pay to play!

Maybe one day we can have a complexity point system instead of just “flight time”.

It’s like the age of majority, age of consent, age to buy a firearm, age to drive a car.

Society is trying to use a readily measurable quantity to look for maturity and good common sense, something many people will never have however old they are. 1500 hours won’t be enough for some and will be far more than needed for others.

Axe the 1,500 along with any other impediments to hiring otherwise they’ll have to raise wages to fill the flight decks... don’t let the the airlines drive the narrative- their bottom line is cheap labor.

When I was still in the 121 world, 2016, I attended a conference at Embry Riddle where Professor Kent Lovelace of North Dakota State University was leading the charge for the repeal of the 1500 hour rule. He now shills for the Regional Airline Association and the North Dakota State faculty webpage shows him as
Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor - Aviation Industry Relations Director. I am a late 1970's graduate of Western Michigan and I think these programs are great. HOWEVER, there is no way that a newly minted Com / Inst / Multi pilot is ready to fly in part 121 operations in a jet. They simply do not have the required level experience.

Graduates of these programs already have a waiver on flight time down to 1000 hours. That's the bare minimum IMHO. That 1000 hour minimum should also require an extended training program at the airline. The RAA and the majors are loath to extend the hour requirements for training. If you lower the hourly requirements there should be a corresponding increase in the training footprint and IOE requirement. This is not a minor thing. Frontline, a PBS documentary program, has just released a hour long program on the Boeing Max. Pilots received no training on the MCAS, maneuvering characteristics augmentation system, because Boeing didn't want to add a training session to deal with it. (Were they pleasing that customer who only operates that particular type of Boeing Airplane??)

I have no first hand knowledge of this but I have heard that in the US there have been MCAS failures with random trim activation. The US crews quickly recognized the situation as a trim runaway and dealt with that as a memory item, de-powering the system. I personally believe that experience played a part in these accidents. Again I have no first hand knowledge but it is my personal belief that experienced US crews are much more inclined to "turn off the magic" if the airplane is not doing what it is supposed to do. Foreign crews seem to be much more reliant on automation.

The rest of the world operates on a MPI, or Multi Pilot License concept. A pilot can end up flying for a major airline in the EU or in Asia with less than 100 hours in an actual aircraft. Simulators are fine, I have more time in sims than many pilots have in total time but they don't accurately simulate real weather, turbulence, real handling degradation due to icing and other factors that require some experience.

On a clear VFR day Air Asia landed short at SFO. It was determined that the ILS was out and the flight crew did not respond properly to the situation. Sim scenarios would have the crew fly the ILS profile. Auto thrust would be in speed mode after glide slope intercept. If they crew was a little high and fast, a distinct possibility on a long winged airplane which has burned off a lot of fuel for landing after crossing the pacific, it would be a bit of a floater. A managed descent with automation on, just as they are trained, and a visual approach using the ILS for guidance. However, no glide slope, no auto-thrust.

Did they do that specific proflie in the simulator?? We don't because you only make that mistake once. And the manual specifically prohibits Level Change mode below 1500'. Auto thrust generally needs a "vertical event" of some type to go from idle descent mode, back to speed mode. There are some many ways that pilots can screw up automation, we are human beings and capable of some real creative ways to mess-up. There needs to be some experience and even mores so some confidence in the ability to turn off the magic when we don't understand what is going on and look out the window and fly the airplane.

During my probation year at US Airways in the DC-9 I had an old captain told me "dammit kid you don't need no ILS, there is the runway,in front of us, we are #1, I just accepted the visual now land the damn airplane! [ DC-9 automation was a compass and a clock. It did have an auto pilot but only altitude hold and we operated in heading mode because we didn't have RNAV and allowing a dinosaur AP50 autopilot circa, 1966, would make everyone in the back puke due to chasing wavy VOR radials.

Even an Airbus works just fine without any magic.

The biggest reason I don't ever see the 1,500 hour rule going away is because I can't think of a single politician who would go on the record to fight for something that would appear to normal people as making air travel less safe.

It was a stupid rule and an arbitrary number, but I don't see it going anywhere.

Absolutely correct!

Fair point. The FO needs to be ready to act as PIC. The 250 hour RJ crash course guy probably wouldn't cut it.

True but it's a false distinction. If going to Riddle mans you can do it at 1000 hours, then you can come up with a non-141 r-atp pathway.

The main challenge with the 1500 hour rule is the Ponzi scheme it sets up. So you're a freshly minted CFI with ~300 hours and ~200 hours dual recieved. To get to 1500 hours you need to give 6 additional students 200 hours dual instruction. Those 6 students each need 6 students, who need 6 students, who need 6 students.....20 cadets in an airline pathway program need 120 cadets to teach as instructors, and those 120 need 720, those 720 need 4,320... ad infinitum...it gets pretty unmanageable really quickly. Before you know it, every man, woman and child in the US is a flight student.

Big flight schools have always solved this problem with non-CFI producing training programs for foreign airlines. Chinese, Korean, Indian, etc. But COVID and the geopolitical turmoil has all but killed that.


I don't think that they will do away with the 1500 hour rul. There will be a new FAA Part 14X standard that comes out for an MPL license. The Europeans have been doing it for decades. Japan does it. You train for ~250 hours in airline specific training, then you move on to type training, and then you have an MPL certificate that only coverts to an ATP after you get more than 1500 hours.

And that assumes that every person makes to through and ends up teaching, too.

True. The washout rate helps reduce the burden.

That’s the ATP business model…get everybody in there [on a loan] and let Gawd sort ‘‘em out.

This is factual, there were MCAS events in the US. Airplanes got flown, trim switches got turned off.


I don't know, there always seems to be at least a little PFM on the bus.

Overseas they do that because most other countries don't HAVE a GA infrastructure which pilots can grow up in. I think here in the US, the airlines will just fund time building... that doesn't require regulatory changes, or much capital investment and they can stop doing it as soon as they don't need it any more. Either ad-hoc time building or maybe an academy format.

Because by the time they realize they need to do something it will be too late for major regulatory changes or setting up a new training infrastructure. It's easy to just rent ASEL in the US.

I think this is where it will go. Once a GA pilot gets over a certain number of hours, they interview, get golden handcuffs, and then an airline will pay for time build. The airline then hires them. If not, some sort of arrangement for partial reimbursement by the pilot will have to be made.

Republic Airways was doing this pre-pandemic. You could get an advance on the new hire bonus to pay for time building to get you to class sooner.

The Majors created the regionals as a way of lowering cost. Cheaper pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, ground crew. Gordon Bethune said it best in a post-colgan interview:

"They're all flying airplanes, but they're not flying the kind of airplanes you are with the same kind of standards that you're flying. So, you let that (regional) operate as an independant business because other people are in that business, but you can't afford to have a lot of excess cost and still win a contract, so it makes the management be cost effective."

Part of that "cost effective" was Rebecca Shaws income at Colgan during her first year, $16,000.

If you allow management to hire 250hr pilots again, wage rates will drop.

The whole career is a Ponzi scheme. CFI, Regionals, LCC, Legacy, narrow body, wide body.

That experienced captain isn't a check airman and shouldn't be a babysitter. I've said it from the start, the right seat of a jet airliner with 50+ paying people onboard is NOT the place to learn how to fly an airplane. Captains aren't there to babysit, they're one part of a two man crew. If the guy next to me is a wet behind the ears zero experience kid holding onto the tail for 4 days, they're of no use to me or to those on board in case of a real emergency. It's one thing having an experienced pilot with no airline experience trying to figure stuff out for a few days. It's a whole other thing having a zero experience pilot try to figure everything out, from "How does an ILS work" to "Why are people yelling 'guard' at me when I talk on the radio?"

Not to mention that pay will be cut and the whipsaw/race to the bottom of the early 2000s will be back if the 1500hr rule went away. All of us civilian folk have had to work our way through the world of aviation and building flight time. This isn't some new thing and honestly if you're willing to work, getting to 1500hrs isn't that difficult, especially right now. There's countless charter, surveying and CFI jobs out there again that can provide priceless experience to a young pilot. Go fly some airplanes in real deal IFR and get some experience before jumping into an ERJ with auto-everything.

Well said. rswitz comments shows his inexperience with this industry. Sadly, he's a soon-to-be ERJ CA too.

A lot of new regional CAs coming online never experienced this industry prior to 117/1500hr rule and it's unfortunate.

Not really. If you get a seniority number at a major, you can reliably predict where you'll end up.

CFI can be ponzi-esque, but in the dark days after 9/11 I still found plenty of work with non-career oriented students. You might have to hustle, as opposed to hanging around the lounge at the puppy mill picking your nose and hoping they put you on the schedule.

This industry is best approached with lots of hustle... once you finish probation at your career destination airline, then you can relax and enjoy.

From firsthand anecdotal experience, I disagree. I do believe there are some stick and rudder, hand-eye-coordination skills from flying 1500 hours ASEL, but 121 is a totally different world. If anything, I'd say there's negative transfer from a Cessna to a jet (the ol' chop and drop, for example, that has wrecked airplanes). Even the SA gained from flying VFR everywhere with students is totally different from 121 IFR. I think there are much better ways to ensure high-quality airline pilots and the FAA should redesign a separate training pipeline for people who want to be career airline pilots. The current system of piling high-interest pilot training debt on student loan debt, then taking a barely liveable wage for a few years to time build, is just not that enticing to most 19 year olds.

Does anyone remember the 1990's? Regionals wouldn't look at you unless you had 1500TT/250 Multi and then you had to fork over $10,000 to pay for your training.

Didn't have $10,000 for an $18,000/yr job? That's okay. Eagle would hire you without pay-for-training, but now you needed 2,000TT and 500 multi.

Kids these days.

And get off my lawn, too.

It's probably more about being the PIC and command mentality than it is about stick-and-rudder skills, although both matter.

If the economics don't work, then the airlines can pay for time-building. They're pursuing waivers for the 1500 rule simply because it's cheaper than time building.

Our system in the US is very safe, and is not comparable to most foriegn systems. Look at accident stats over the last 10-20 years, especially the last decade... those numbers paint a stark picture, way too stark to write off as statistical anomalies. I can count on the fingers of one hand the foriegn carriers who I would consider to be equivalent to US safety. And our regionals are our soft under-belly as it is.

forums.flightinto.com

may it Rest In Peace

You just made me go look.....

It's just flightinfo.com btw.

I get the feeling 1500 hours was an arbitrary number and most guys learn more about being an airline pilot from sims and OE than all of their 1500 hours combined, so there must be a faster way to condense that experience. But you make a good point that our safety record is significantly better than most overseas airlines and everybody I fly with uses autopilot because they're lazy, not because they have to, so the process is working.

Reminds me of the Ethiopian 737Max crash. The FO had, if I recall, 250 hours. None of that was as a GA pilot, no decision making. How much of the minimal number of hours at Ethiopian was “Keep you ideas to yourself. Keep your hands in your lap. Just operate the radio.”

Hehehehehe, excellent post.