Well, I was lucky that I beat this requirement, because that was my first commercial flying job. I learned a lot flying sightseeing tours. I learned about what it was like to fly passengers. I learned about flying on hot summer days, in wind, dealing with thunderstorms, distractions from passengers while flying, etc. all in a heavy loaded airplane.

I can see the need to protect the public. The sad thing is that it is just going to get harder harder to get any experience. Looking back, I shudder to think of the liability the pilot would have if a tire blew and a passenger scraped their knee (or worse).

How are new pilots going to get experience???

"He is sitting there eating fritos watching reruns of sanford and son and all of a sudden you are on the line."

Haha, such powerful imagery!

Thanks though, I appreciate it. I'm not really that desperate to be piloting some passenger jet in the future, but instead I'm kind of nostalgic for old school flying. Ideally, I'd like to be loading and unloading crates of Salmon in coastal Alaska and then flying them to Seattle in terrible IMC using NBDs and VORs. It sounds crazy, but that kind of flying is always the kind that made me realize how much I loved to fly.

Of course, maybe I could find some sort of job like that in Seattle, but I'm sure they're many more already living there who are keen on that job market over some redneck fool from Tennessee like myself.

Hey! Lets start our own salmon freight company, flying DC-3's from the Aleutians to Seattle in rock hard IMC. I LOVE IT! That's my kind of flying! I love flying in bare minimums through the mountains on some sketchy NDB approach. LOL! Tennessee, eh? South Carolina here. Well, SoCal at the moment. :-( I hope to be flying the DC3 from LGB to AVX twice daily here in a few months. I think there might be some boxed up salmon on that plane.

blastboy,

Well if you're not up in the Northwest, you still must be getting some good fog down in Socal?

about AVX...

The first time I flew into AVX, I had been flying in the sultry, flat South with pretty standard, predictable approaches. Needless to say, it was quite a surprise when I got that yank downward when I was coming over the cliffs! Nobody warned me beforehand, but luckily I recovered and learned to keep more power on that approach. Creepy though.