What do you mean?

Thats helpful. To whom?

TD this has been explained to you before. Lynx was a startup but the pilot group was a stacked deck. The lowest time pilot had just shy of 2000 hrs, how much did you have in 2007 when you started? This was not the 1st job for any of our startup pilots, later yes, but the initial group no.

If your guys are to fly the Q green on green it'll take time and money to train everyone and then more time to get everyone up to speed. High mins captains, low time F/O's not to mention ASE, good luck.

I asked you before TD if you've heard anything on your side of the "fence"? Hint hint.

The same. My earlier post might have not been as clear as I intended, sorry for the confusion. My point was that Lynx was a new airline running new routes. At some point people had to go into Aspen for a first time. While I have no idea what bs the company will try and pull I have no doubt that flying in wouldn't be an issue with proper training.


I don't know what you're getting at by this. You'll have to spell that one out a little for me.

Not really, we had a lot of Ex-Mesa Dash 8 folks with lots of Aspen time so the program expanded off of theirs. The manuals were written and for those of us who hadn't been in there, we got plenty of sim and line training. Which I greatly appreciated after listening to everybody else going in there. It seemed like us and SkyWest were the only ones who knew what they were doing up there. Seen and heard a lot of scary stuff from the corporate folks. Not a place to mess around with.

Although I think we did have a while with mostly junior pilots flying the Aspen lines because no one wanted to do 6 legs, all Aspen, all day for no money. No premium pay, short flights, lots of work, long briefings for each approach. They tried the premium pay for a month, then we lost that, then they mixed the day trips with ABQ and gave those lines the most days off. That seemed to work somewhat.

Okay, I'll bite...what kind of "scary stuff" did you see & hear from "corporate folks" up in Aspen?

Is it a challenging airport? Yes...but it ain't rocket science.

I heard this one: "What do you mean single engine departure? Balked procedure??"

I don't know the performance characteristics of a Citation but I bet they're not good enough to not need a special single engine departure. But many people just blast off like it's any other airport.

Hopefully something more is in the mix regarding the Q. What was your average flight time on those legs? It'd be nice to see it stay in service. There are several routes being flown currently that could really benefit from them.

For the record, even SkyWest has a waiver to operate into Aspen, AWAC was the last operator that I know of that could actually fly out of there successfully after losing an engine. That might've been because they had 4 on the BACjet though :)

I have heard a lot of pilots chatter about things over at Atlantic ASE at a previous job... like "we are part 91 so we don't need all that climb gradient stuff" or "it's VFR, if we lose an engine we should be able to keep it level". I spoke with an ASE controller one day and he said the FAA was sitting in the tower the IFR day before copying down tail numbers as everyone took off. Then they were sending out letters to the listed PIC asking for proof of the modifications made to the airplanes so they were legal to make the LINDZ departure climb gradient. I bet violations followed shortly after. If it's VFR you don't need much but IFR watch out.

Lynx required 100 or 200 hours in the left seat and approval by the training department before you could attempt to become ASE qualified. During the checkout you had to do a Loc 15, circle 33 and a Roaring fork visual. Even doing 3 turns a day the conditions rarely allowed you do all 3 in the same day... with checkouts averaging 3 days. Recently they added a night landing as a requirement. Same procedures were required to be done in the sim within 3 months prior to checkout plus balked landings for both runways. Obviously with the limited lifespan of the Q's at RAH they aren't going to waste the money training any new people to do this... especially considering they aren't typed.

Lynx started flying in Dec and flew the first flight to ASE in April... so everyone had the hourly requirement before it happened.