don´t know about your country . . .
but over here in mexico it is the norm for pilots to start out in airlines such as Mexicana or Aeromexico right out of school when they rarely have more 200 hours.
It is a fact that this does not affect safety, one of these Airlines belongs to the Star Alliance and they are both among the largest in Latin America, (Aeromexico has been the most punctual airline in the world for several years.) they both have a good safety record.
I had an excoworker who (jose messer) who at the age of 25 was 757 instructor pilot in Seattle and was captian in every LearJet there was. Don´t believe me call Boeing.
Anbody that tells you low time copilots affect safety to a considerable degree doesn´t know what he is talking about, they are just jealous, flying planes is almost idiotproof, its mostly about checklists, procedures, there´s not a lot of thinking left for the pilot, its mostly about sticking to the book, and you could almost train monkeys to do this, me being one of them.
A few years back after flying helicopters for a while, I decide to try the ¨stiff wing¨ route, I had only my FAA CPL with about 190 hours in piston Cessna´s and Piper´s, I had not flown an airplane in 6 years and 8 days after I turned in my resume I was in FlightSafety in Wichita taking the Beechjet 400A initial pilot course with another guy from my same company that had only 180 hrs.
That was fun, we drove our instuctor nuts he couldn´t believe all the stupid things we were doing and we never once got killed! (in the level D simulator) On our very first take off he said ¨cleared for takeoff, maintain RWY HDG and 3000 feet¨so we took off and and after a few seconds we were passing 10,000 feet, gear and flaps still down listening to the overspeed warning horn and we both had this huge grin in our face as we felt it was ¨sooo cooool!¨he then reminded us we had to stay at 3000, reduce power and retract gear/flaps looong ago, and my sim partners response was ¨where does it say how high we are?¨ then I started looking for the gear lever which I was sure was somewhere to be found.
I remember during stall practice at something like 20,000 feet we entered a spin, and leveled out about 300 feet AGL, the instructor said ¨I was scared, I thought we were gonna die¨
After 2 weeks and lot of simulator time we ended up passing the course, and after a year and 600 hours we started flying the B400A from the Left seat, I only stayed for a little more than a year, am now back to flying helicopters, I hated flying planes but my sim partner is now close to upgrading to the Hawker 800XP and also flies the Falcon 2000 SIC.
If the US navy has 400 hrs. pilot landing on a carrier at night on an F14, why shouldn´t a 20 year old fly a slow dull turboprop or passenger jet into a perfectly good airport with all the help in the world.