Originally Posted by
cessnapete
You don't have to have 1500 hours as in FAA land, or thousands of hours in GA land as Australia, or have been a Fast Jet ace, to be a competent and safe airline co pilot. For many years in Europe, (EasyJet/BA for example) 250 plus hour "Cadet Pilots" have gone straight into the RHS of B737/Airbus A320 family, on two pilot operations.
It's the selection and training that matter, not thousands of hours instructing in a C172 for example.
It’s funny. You can search back through this forum’s posts over the last 20 years and find dozens of cadet bashing threads that have virtually the same arguments. “They’re unsafe”, “they’re useless in an emergency”, “they’re driving down wages”......
However we’ve had cadet programs in operation in Australia since the 60s, and the rest of the world bar the US and some other places virtually only use ab initio trained pilots, but no statistically significant patterns in pilot error caused accidents.
As for the “I’ve flown as PIC with cadets and non cadets and it’s clear the former are useless in an emergency”, how do you think Captains survive in the many large and well respected airlines where they basically only employ cadets? Two cadets in the same flight deck?? Planes should be spearing in constantly. But BA38 and UA178 pilots were cadets. AA965 and AA1420 were ex military.......
Anyway back to the original point of the thread. Upon further inspection of Bonza’s uniform launch I think a crisis has been averted. The female pilot used for the launch is not wearing white sneakers, but a pair of normal black leather shoes. So at least pilots seem to have a choice to not wear those footwear abominations.