Originally Posted by
421dog
I’ll bet he had a bunch more hours than a lot of us who have flown for a living in more than “Cessnas”.
The media reporting that describes the pilot as the owner of "Quick Air" is misleading. One smallish division of his business conglomerate is aviation (ambulance flights, MRO), but he was never a pilot-turned-business-owner. This guy was an engineer who owned one of the largest plant construction businesses in Germany with an annual turnover of 150m EUR and 1.500+ employees. This aviation stuff was really just a side-show because he had a personal interest in aviation and at some point in his life when he had money to spare he ventured into that area (one of his sons is running that aspect of the family business, by the way). He had 50 years of flying experience under his belt, sure, but running his business empire did not allow him to fly that much. So yes, he was type-rated, he was sort of experienced, but not necessarily proficient. Looking at the flight history of the aircraft, it was flown typically 2 or 3 times a month (and not necessarily by him). Before the doomed flight, it had sat on the ground at XRY for 8 days.