Originally Posted by
Sloppy Link
25 year break will require induction, line training, uniform to name a few. Let’s be generous, he is an effective member of the workforce at his 58th birthday. In under two years time, the whole process will have to start all over again with the attendant costs on trainers time, administrators time, aircraft hours, more procurement when the original hasn’t had its five year expected life and so on. Type rating and experience from 25 years ago helps but doesn’t mean you can be recruited on Tuesday and be on shift at the weekend. We don’t know what was put on the application, location of applicant, distance to travel, prepared to move, where vacancies were he would accept and so on. Harsh but, business is business.
I guess thatīs where the difference between "HR-people" and "Chief Pilots" is....
An HR person would argue exactly like you do.
A Chief Pilot would tell you that certain jobs require certain experience-flying Single pilot at night under NVG in an urban environment, chasing down a car or attending to an accident where no HEMS helicopter would fly any more can not be done by someone who just ticked the 1000 hour box mark, or who just had his "5 hours of theoretical night vision goggle training" done.
The downside of the current and ongoing situation (which in the helicopter world must have started sometime around the year 2000, as i am still waiting for the "demand" that flight schools have been promising since the mid 90īs) is that "experience" does not count any more....
Take the German ADAC for example:
They claim they are desperate for pilots due to retirement and expansion-but they let experience pilots "fail" their weird tests, which were originally designed to evaluate whether an applicant for a pilot license would be successful in getting his license or not; now they even outsource the process by training their own pilots-in the US...
Other companies (like NHV, Babcock) need experienced pilots to fly in high-risk countries, but rather employ very young pilots with almost nil experience, but they are coming with the correct type rating, rather than hiring experienced pilots and train them on type...
But this has never been any different-at least from my point of view....
Companies always look at money first-and they do not complete the math where "money spent" should equal "experience bringing" to the company....
Originally Posted by
DOUBLE BOGEY
Huey.....just speculating and yes always looking forward.
Sounds like me!
I am already looking for that "retirement job" now......preferably some place warm!