Apruneuk, I'm not sure what your experience is, but some of your statements suggest that you don't have a full grasp of the current airline pilot situation, and your colourful description of the past, while entertaining, is, I think, a little overdone. In any case, what the airline scene of the 1930s has to do with the current training scenario, even pre-MPL, I fail to understand!
Fast forward to today. Transport aircraft are now highly automated multi-million dollar pieces of kit. The sky they fly in is increasingly crowded, particularly around the major airports and the airlines run on miniscule margins, relying on high turnover to generate the necessary cash to stay afloat. In this compo-mad World we live in, even one crash is likely to be enough to put an airline out of business. A computer will fly a modern jet far more efficiently than any human but the public still like to think that there is a man who will take control if things go wrong. CRM has massively reduced the instances of avoidable accidents and low houred pilots now enter service rated on type and are the product of a regimented training process; two complete strangers can now fly as a team from the minute they meet and seamlessly change to a new partner if required.
- Transport aircraft have been highly-automated, multi-million dollar pices of kit for several years. Even the B747 Classics I used to fly (dating from around 1980) were highly-automated, multi-million dollar pieces of kit. This is not a new thing!
- The sky is indeed increasingly crowded, but it is far less hazardous than it used to be. Airlines do work on relatively small margins, but I can't think of one that has collapsed as the result of a single accident.
- CRM has made an incremental improvement in safety, but it has not 'massively reduced the instances of avoidable accidents'. It is an important weapon in the overall pursuit of safety, not the only one.
- The public is absolutely right to expect there to be a man at the controls when things go wrong. Computers do
not fly 'more efficiently' than people; what they do is offload pilots so that their capacity for decision-making is increased. Even my brand-new A340-600 can't make decisions and is terrible at prioritising. That's one of the reasons we do CRM and MCC - how could CRM make a difference if the computers can do it all?
- The odds of a co-pilot having to fly the aircraft in an emergency are actually quite high; there are several emergency scenarios in which hand-flying of the aircraft is required and, to allow the captain to have the time and capacity to think, it is the first officer who gets the job every time.
You are right that airline training should follow a different route from an early stage. As in military flying, the PPL syllabus is irrelevant from pretty much right after first solo, and there's no reason why the commercial syallabus shouldn't diverge at that point also. However, I see no indication that this syllabus will be picked up and paid for by the industry; it seems to me that it will be an expensive speculative qualification for most, just as it is now.
Scroggs