A few things I haven't seen discussed on this thread.

1 The insurance companies are very good at assessing their level of risk exposure and approriate compensation for those risks. As pilots that may not have ever had to pay for the insurance on an airplane, many folks may not be aware that the folks with less than 1,000 hours pay a much higher rate then those above. Does this mean a person with 998 hours is more likely to have an accident than a person with 1,002 hours... no, not specifically. The insurance companies have taken the accident and claims paid in comparison to flight hours and determined the magic numbers are 100, 500 & 1000. The highest accident/incident claim/loss comes with the 100 hour pilot, the second most claim prone is the less than 500 hour pilot, and the least accident/incident prone was the over 1,000 hour pilot. The exact formula they use is a mystery to me, but that is how they have chosen to price their premiums for aircraft owners.

2 A review of the anual Nall Report, available free on AOPA online, will support the insurance industries claims of the 100, 500 & 1,000 hour breakdowns.

3 While nobody is saying that endlessly droning around in a 150 around the local practice area is a good experience as 1/3 the time practicing and flying IFR... what people are failing to acknowledge is the fact that the longer you spend time in airplanes, the greater the opportunity to have had something go wrong inflight, requiring you the pilot, to make very important decisions.
Many people experience their first emergency and leave flying all together.... most airline pilots have experienced several emergencies, or critical situations, BEFORE they ever stepped foot into a part 121 airline flightdeck...
An informal conversation with a few of your company check airman who do IOE will undoubtedly reveal many of the newer lower time pilots who have "frozen up" when a master caution or master warning tripped... it isn't anythig against them, they just have never been in an airplane when things went rapidly south. Comming from a college or bridge program with state of the art equipment that you have flown for 250-400 hours without ever having so much as a hiccup doesn't afford a novice pilot the opportunity to have dealt with a critical event.... if you fly long enough, everybody will get their chance... most have had the chance when they were only risking their own life... now we do it with passengers.

just a slightly different take on the subject.

.02

 

between this post and what he has written under his name i think we know who the guy with the upside down epaulettes you all have been talking about seeing in the hubs...

 

If you even have to ask the question, you need some more hours...

It is well known by anyone in aviation that there is a great deal to be learned in the first 1000 hours. This is commonly known by anyone who's been around a bit, it is well known by the insurance companies, and can be demonstrated statistically (check out AOPA if you want deets).

Obviously that's not a precise number that fits every case, but a 300 hour pilot has accumulated essentially all of his experience under adult supervision...kind of like a teenager with a learner's permit. There are many, many things to be learned between 300 and 1000 hours...

- Get your Complacency bubble popped. This might even take longer.
- Learn about mother nature's fickleness.
- Deal with an emergency or two.
- Acquire better comms skills.
- Hopefulyy acquire some IMC...this is a biggy.
- Learn how to balance regulatory, safety, employer, and customer demands. Esay to do as a student when you ARE the customer...not so easy when the boss (and your credit card) really wants to bill some hours.
- As a CFI, learn some leadership and command skills.


IIRC, the statistics show a big statistical risk reduction between PPL and 1000, then a gradual improvement up to around 5000 or so. After that it's pretty level. This does not account for different aircraft types. Also ATP's are statistically much safer than PPL or COMM pilots...the COMM and ATP checkrides are pretty similar, I wonder if it has anything to do with the 1500 hours?

Bottom line, insurance requirements don't lie. They are not in business to turn away every possible customer...on the contrary, they want to sign up as many customers as they can, but without undue risk. They know what they are doing.

And the problem with low-time regionals FO's is that 121 is VERY safe and mostly free of excitement. You are not likely to ever get scared in the right seat of an RJ because not much happens and you have a babysitter if it does. But eventually you will upgrade...If something hits the fan I would prefer that the captain already knows how to deal with scary situations.

 

When i hit 1000 hours I saw how little knowledge/experience I had at 500 hours. When I hit 2000 hours I also saw how little experience I had compared to 1000. When I hit 5000 hours I saw how much more knowledge/experience I had than when I had 2000. When I hit 8000 hours I saw how little I knew at 5000. etc...

 

Actually - if you have no other flight experience the fighter guys will be flying a jet for the first time somewhere around 60-80 hrs. Now they will have somewhere around 160-180 hrs before getting into their assigned 'fleet' aircraft. The numbers reflected are approximate and reflect USN/USMC jet aircraft.

USMCFLYR

 

I find this interesting since it seems to me that most civilian pilots would say that the most challenging times are the takeoffs, terminal area operations (approaches) and landings.

Let's take 100 hours of that time as an example. If I am flying 1 hour flights then I operate in that environment 100 times and I personally am hand flying my aircraft for a majority of that 1 hour. If I am flying 6 hr legs (most of which are flown on the autopilot) then I am operating in that same environment only 16 times. I guess it is a different way of looking at the value of that 1000 hrs we were originally talking about. My flying does NOTHING to prepare me for mainline flying - something that I worry about all the time; but I'm pretty sure that I can successfully be retrained

USMCFLYR

 

I figured that insurance requirements played into the 1000 hr mark in some important matters. In the military the magic numbers are 500 and 1500 hrs TT for the most accident prone pilots. The numbers you mentioned seem to cover only a small part of flight experience. Do they not mention mishap rates of pilots above 1000TT?

USMCFLYR

 

I was actually talking about the assigned aircraft. My apologies for not making that clear. My knowledge of USN/USMC flight times is limited. Everything I spoke of was in reference to USAF.

 

Military flying is a whole different animal, with it's own, seperate set of statistics.

Here are the civilian stats: http://www.aopa.org/asf/publications/06nall.pdf

 

Military flyers are carefully screened before they begin training...then the training forces an even higher standard on them. If you can't hack it within the alloted time, you get washed fast...daddy can't buy you some more training. Can't really compare a winged guy hitting the fleet with a civilian fresh out of the puppy-mill.

Major airlines will hire a 1200 hour fighter guy.

A 1200 hour civilian is lucky to get a regional interview (2006-2007 was an abberation)