Originally Posted by
MoreDaysOffPlease
Struggle to see what ‘widebody experience’ has to do with anything nowadays. If you can fly a 737 you can fly anything 🥴 Ask any pilot who’s moved from the 737 to ANYTHING else and I’m sure they’ll tell you it’s a pleasure.
But seriously at many major airlines you can skip narrow body FO to wide body FO and go straight to narrow body command. Then when your seniority number is up go straight to a wide body command, having never sat in the pointy end of a 2 aisle aircraft.
I think the whole widebody experience historically was more to do with the vast parts of the world you would travel to on widebody aircraft and the experience that came with that. Oceanic operations, ETOPS, different RARs in exotic parts of the world, crossing vast mountain ranges and dealing various weather phenomena around the world. In the past that sort of experience could only be gathered on a big bird.
At flydubai you can cover all that in a couple of weeks on the 737. Even NAT-HLA ops is there as they do their own deliveries. I think the main difference for the pilots is that the 78 will be easier to fly 🙃. Oh, and they won’t feel so tired with the 5000FT cabin and there is a place to go for a nap.
So I’d imagine they will need to be a handful of 787 folk brought in to get the operation started as any operator would need when operating a new type. Thereafter it will be upgrades from within. For sure to satisfy insurance you’d need 2-3000 hours command on the 73 to move to left seat on the 78. No problem there as there are 100s of pilots at FZ with 1000s of command hours on the Boeing.
Many got upgraded straight to the LHS wide body but it takes many hours of line traing. For airlines its easier and cheaper to hire experienced skippers unless we talk legacy airlines where your career path is well designed.
Some airlines take shortcuts and later you can hear stories about those captains america.