Originally Posted by
Chronic Snoozer
So how do you know they've done that safely? Do you know what risk the passengers have been exposed to? How many near misses have RYR had?
Papering over the cracks of a teetering or weak SMS by pointing to the hull loss record makes me think of management who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. I'm not suggesting there is a problem at Ryanair, just that the basis of your argument is flawed.
To know that answer fully one would have to be intimately involved over the long term with both the ab initio, commercial, instrument, multicrew and then airline endorsement, recurrent and command training with a range of airlines that hired pilots from different backgrounds and also have hard statistical data to objectively evaluate outcomes from differing pilot backgrounds. And also have knowledge of different SMS’s and how they adapt to differing backgrounds.
As none of us would have access to such data we go mostly off anecdotal experience, and then there’s such a wide range of opinions there.
But.......
I would say the object of airline safety is to provide relatively safe outcomes and very few incident per flight as can be. Now if we look at Ryanair we can see an airline that has mostly employed low houred ab-initio cadets and has had outcomes equal to or better than Australian carriers, who employ pilots from a range of backgrounds, both cadet and not.
Now you could say that RY not having a hull loss is a fluke, and they may still have a poor SMS. But then add in all the other EU carriers, LH, BA, KLM, IB, SAS, Wizz, Easyjet etc among many other who mostly or totally employ low houred cadets. Now you’re looking at a total fleet size and pilot group many times larger than Australia and we’re not seeing endemic issues.
You can try to argue the differences in outcome from cadets vs a non cadets, but with global aviation being relatively so safe you’re really arguing semantics.