Originally Posted by
parabellum
Possibly time for the regulators to step in to scrub the Multi Engine Licence and insist on 1500 hours of GA or 1500 hours of mixed GA and light twin turbo first officer experience, anything to develop the natural reactions to an aircraft with the potential to fall out of the sky if not attended to properly?
Personally I see it in a different way. What active pilots do need, be them airline, corporate or whatever is constant and recurrent training. The minimum training and checking requirements laid down by the major authorities worldwide can be insufficient to effectively warrant complete proefficiency to those pilots who do not push themselves to dig in more for extra knowledge and practice. A big chunk of the pilot population gets in the book a few days before their recurrent PPC and most of the time already with a good idea of what is going to happen inside the box. Why does that happen ? I believe one of the main reasons is that flying pilots up to their maximum limits obviously requires subsequent rest and time for family/social activities, with less and less time that can be dedicated to self study and preparation. If Authorities / Operators increased the amount of
rostered mandatory ground recurrent training and sim training and checking then it could be a big step forward. You can pick up a guy with as many hours as You want of GA to fly on the line, but if subsequently he/she doesn't keep up on track with the constant need of self updating then it will be completely useless. Now having guys on the ground studying and in the sim is expensive for airlines, who need them to fly passengers and not in front of their Ipad to periodically review the several thousand pages of different company manuals and procedures. The question is : how many of those accidents would have happened with better trained and aware pilots ? Nowadays a type rating can take 3 weeks, when I started flying it took 3 months and we had a ground instructor for every system of the aircraft. I believe there should be a way somewhere in between.
My 2 pennies