What is the purpose of the 1,500 hour rule?
 

If it's going to raise regional pilot pay then I am all for it, but if its to increase safety then I'm confused. I don't understand why the FO needs to have the same qualifications as the captain. A doctor in his residency can perform surgery with a licensed doctor supervising, once they are out of residency and pass the board exam they are a licensed doctor and make good money. It just seems that this pilot profession requires additional certification without having anything happen to pay. Please clarify if I misunderstood something.

1,500 hours is nothing, quit crying.

10 pages, MINIMUM.

I know what you mean. I got my commercial in 2010. at that time I could have started working and a few months later I could go to an airline. But I decided to go back to school and finish my degree. Now I am 2 years behind my cohorts because I decided I wanted a degree

This horse is so dead...

Not a multitasker?

This is just a guess, but I think for the most part it was a reaction to the Colgan accident captain's method of reaching the level of airline employment. He had hours and hours logged wherein apparently not the appropriate learning had occurred. He failed a bunch of primary training, and then instead of going to learn something for a thousand hours that may have been useful someday, he saw an easier route... paid for a "job" building "valuable" SIC time and proceeded to learn almost nothing that might have helped him know how to pay attention at critical moments.

Hours are a crude way to judge a pilot, but they are one of the few ways available, so here we are with 1500 needed. It is trying to prevent the above pathway of "learning" and "skill development" from ever happening quite so easily again. If you have a giant pile of money, it is probably still possible to learn nothing and have 1500 hours. The point is, most people don't, and those that do... why would they need to become airline pilots? They'll take care of themselves in a Cirrus/Bonanza/Citation someday.

The purpose of the 1500hr rule is to keep people like YOU away from the airlines until you know *** you are doing in an airplane, which generally just STARTS at around 1500hrs.

Now go and continue to instruct while you pay off your $200K of student loans to the Harvard of the skies.

I smell ATP flight school......

Good judgment comes from experience, experience comes from poor judgment--that is, if you don't die in the process.

Also: no surgical resident ever died from making a mistake while operating on someone else.

And isn't there now a minimum 121 experience required before upgrade to captain? Therefore the new FO (even at 1500 hours) is not equal to the new 121 PIC experience requirement. The lowest time pt121 captain will be a military 750 hr ATP new hire FO who then does 1000 at the 121 level. So 1750 for military route, 2500 for civilian? I don't know, I haven't actually read the book.

Because Joe-public thinks that you (pilot) needs to have more experience before flying them around. And not a whisper about raising your pay. So guess who pays for the 1500 hr rule? The answer lies in the mirror in your house. Welcome to aviation :)

So suck it up and enjoy building those hours... while some chump from another country you trained as a CFI goes and flies some heavy metal with their wet ticket you helped them get. :rolleyes:

A Physician out of his residency holds an ATP.

Comparing this career to that of a Physician is both common and deeply flawed. That said, IMO the argument that you are really making is that Captain qualifications should be raised. And they should be, since a 1500 hour ATP is in no position to be in command in a 121 operation.

However the insurance companies have taken care of that. So while it appears that the two seats have the same qualifications, there is in reality a higher bar on the left seat.

What's wrong with learning how to be a master of the skies in 90 days? That's ample time to gain all the experience you need. You get to see and experience weather year round.... Wait wait no you don't.......

Remember the days when it took 2500 TT and 500 multi to get an interview with a regional? I am so tired of hearing people complain about 1500 hours.

If that supervising doctor DIES during surgery, they can probably find a qualified doctor to take his place in a matter of minutes in a pinch. If your captain dies in the cockpit, it's just you, hence reason for dual PIC type ratings, etc.

Yep.......

Yep. And along those lines, 50 passengers would not have died on flight 3407 if the Captain had spent a summer towing banners or flight instructing.

Basic airmanship does not come out of a course catalog.

Nor a puppy-mill IFR training program which forbids instrument training flights in actual IMC...for safety reasons :rolleyes:

A wet commercial is like a 16 year old with a new driver's license...you don't give him a job driving a schoolbus or a tractor trailer, you give him a beater with a 4-banger and airbags.

As someone who flew with MAPD grad captains, I can definitely see the point of the 1500 rule.

It used to take 1500-2500 with some turbine time to even get considered by a regional. This rule is just a reaction to some sectors of the industry exercising poor judgement in hiring practices.

As others have said, 1500 is no big deal, two years as a CFI and you'll have some fun too.

Flight training expenses have gone up significantly and many of those old 135 jobs are almost impossible to find now, so it's not a fair comparison to bring up the old de facto mins.

The only reliable time building job these days is flight instructing, but you need more people on the bottom starting their training than at the top teaching for it to work. It's essentially a pyramid scheme, and I'm not sure we can sustain it. A big reason we've been able to so far is foreign students. As someone else pointed out, they'll start flying a widebody at 250 hours while you're still slaving away in a 172 with no air conditioning in the summer for minimum wage. To add insult to injury, we're training our future competition.

So your captains don't have to flight instruct as much when new guys are flying their first jet.

Chances are you will make more instructing in a 172 than you will at the regionals. Just saying...

Made about ~$14,750 as an instructor in 2013. Given, it was a lower paying school, but that was working 60-70 hour weeks, usually 6-7 days a week. The monthly minimum at my regional is about my best month's paycheck instructing.

Dude, you were at the wrong school. I was making $30,000 as an instructor with weekends off. Now I'm living the dream flying a jet making $20,000 and home 11 days out of the month.

How did you live on 14k? Seriously?

I'm a fan of the "1500 hour rule' because it raises the bar to applicants, thus narrowing the field of available pilots and making us a more valuable commodity. It's interesting that doctors have been mentioned, since the AMA has been doing this for years by controlling medical school admissions.

As for the Colgan tragedy, some of you are talking like the CA went straight from a Seminole to the left seat of a Q400. He had airline experience as both a Captain and First Officer. The problem was fatigue among both pilots due to improper commuting which led to poor judgement and mistakes by BOTH of them. Yes, more experience may have helped, but when people commute on a redeye, sleep in crew lounges, then fly all day, it doesn't matter how many hours you have, you're going to screw up. So the "1500 hour rule" IMO adds little to safety, it was a convenient excuse to raise the bar.

As a side note, we have had many 1500 hour applicants recently struggling through training where 300 hour ERAU wonders used to make it through with no problems. Hours aren't everything.

I agree, it was pretty bad. At the time it was the only school within a few miles of where I lived and I couldn't afford a car, so I biked there. By the time I managed to get a car, I was most of the way to hiring mins at a regional and it didn't seem worth it to jump ship.

I see a lot of friends with smartphones, nice cars or even new ones, paying for their own apartment, etc. Many are taking on lots of debt though. I got a dumb phone that does texts and phone calls, a 10-year-old car that looks cruddy but has been reliable, and I share a place with several other guys for a few hundred a month. I really try not to spend money on frivolous things; my one vice is going out to the movie theater and getting a big tub of popcorn. You gotta live a little, right?

There's a very small trickle of income on the side from a Youtube channel I have (~$150 a year), and I'm fortunate to have parents who will help me out if I'm ever in a crunch. But mostly, just try to be frugal and live within your means as much as possible. The goal is to keep that up a few more years as pay slowly increases...

Why yes I do. Why yes. I am too.

Very good post. Fatigue has been compared to being intoxicated, and it affects decision making accordingly. Additionally I might ask, what was the pilot doing to acquire the 1500 hours? I mean was the majority of his or her experience flying around the local airport, or was their experience more extensive than that? Let's face it, we don't get the experience with thunderstorms, wind shear, ice, or contaminated runways and such as a flight instructor. That's where the 121 training comes into play, and in my opinion the FAA didn't do their job in monitoring Colgan

No, they're not impossible to find by any means, you just need 1200 hours like always...and you need to be able to fly your way out of a wet paper bag too.

This is true in a sense but it's not a pyramid scheme exactly. It depends essentially on a five-for-one replacement. Each CFI needs 1500 hours...start with 300, so you need 1200 dual given. If each student needs about 200 hours dual, that's six CPL/CFI students to support one working CFI through 1500 hours. That's obviously not sustainable, and would only be temporarily viable during periods of massive regional hiring and interest in aviation careers (late 90's, early-mid 2000's?)

But foreign training demand isn't going away soon, and at least half of my dual given was for private, ie non-career, pilots.

The foreigners could take their training home, but in many cases it will always be cheaper to come to the US than to re-engineer their local regulations and build a non-existant GA infrastructure...we're not just talking about buying a few skyhawks, we're talking about building airports...

If the foreigners do go home and GA continues to wither, then the day may come where the airlines face a real pilot shortage. First they'll dramatically downsize the regionals; lifer captains will be unemployed because they have no one to sling gear for them. But since the whole point of regionals is cheap labor, the industry will not start subsidizing primary flight training just to keep regionals alive.

If there is ever actually a looming shortage of applicants for MAJOR airline jobs, then the majors will start looking at scholarships or even ab-initio type programs...but we're a very long way from that.

Google Air Crash Investigation...numerous episodes about recent crashes of non-US airliners due to basic airmanship issues.

They typically get paid more than we do. They're not going to competing with us any time soon as labor, although the quality product of some overseas carriers could attract international travellers who are fed up with the abuse of US majors.

Cabotage is not coming to the US in the foreseeable future, there are too many security concerns (some of which are legit).

Really? So in the instances BEFORE FO's got a type, EVEN the SIC, how did they ever handle the plane when the CA died? (roll eyes)

The reason for the 1500 hr rule, is because the families of Colgan 3407 lobbied hard and exposed that the airlines would not regulate themselves and that there was too much back scratching between the FAA and the airlines which they supposedly regulate--which was shown on the "Chuck Colgan is friend of the FAA testimony". The politicians did try to avoid raising the requiremnts, but the families would not let the issue die. They followed the lawmakers around, brought a lot of heat on them. Prior to this, MESA was actually hiring 250 hr pilots for a short time.

Eagle was hiring 250hr pilots in 2008. They went back to 1,000hrs in 2010 and lower it again to 500 in 2011.

My point exactly, the real negligence here is lies with the FAA. How in the world did they get away with it?

Toolbag quote of the day. :)

3407 was not a question of judgement. It was a pilot who pulled the yoke into his gut when the stall warning system went off and then held it there.

That is EXACTLY what some time spent in a non-airline enviroment would have not taught him not to do -- no matter how little sleep he had. In fact "taught" is a poor word, "burned into his soul" would be a better term.

We are a product of our experiance, and that experiance should be deeper than a mud puddle when step into our first 121 job.

That sounds correct for a tail stall recovery, could have just been a misdiagnosis.

to me, that sounds like a guy shutting down the left engine with a right engine fire and then saying "that sounds correct for a left engine fire could have just been a misdiagnosis"