Junkflyer, we are grown up aren't we!!
250 hour pilots flying my family around won't happen.
I might be stepping into the abyss here but to try and balance this up, i'm a 737 F/O with 600 hrs on type and roughly 900 tt.
There is no problem with low hours, but with poor quality low hours. The ability to pay for a typerating has allowed some people who would NEVER have been selected to do one, become rated on a jet aircraft. That's put them one step from being in the right place and the right time and bang, they're in the right hand seat of a jet.
I personally would blame the flight schools for selling the dream to anyone with enough money. The fact is, flying a jet airliner is not like driving a bus and not everyone can do it.
Some of you are obviously hankering after a time gone by here. With the amount of pilots currently required by the industry, the routes to a jet job that the majority of you are advocating are not capable of producing sufficient guys. I suspect there may also a be a bit of jealousy. Whatever you might say about wanting to fly a cargo turboprop around at night, if someone had offered you a well paid jet job at the same time you would have leapt at it. If you continue to say otherwise you're only fooling yourself.
Low houred pilots have never been an issue in the past. I'd even suspect that some of the posters on here could well have been BA cadets. Why have they never had a problem? Same goes for the RAF. They employ young guys who,with no flying experience, go tearing around the countryside after a couple of hundred hours training. It's all about selection, and there's still a reason that BA, BMI etc put low houred guys through that arduous process. It works! 411A hit the nail on the head with comments about the professionalism of F/O's and good training being a must, something I believe the majority of airlines are implementing corectly. The training department in my airline is excellent.
As for the experience side of it I fail to see, and no one will convince me otherwise, that a thousand hours flying SINGLE PILOT in a light twin can in any way prepare you both flying-wise and experience-wise for flying a MULTI-PILOT jet. It's completely different flying, and only connected by the fact you leave the ground to do your job. This applies 10-fold if you're flying a Scarebus.
It sounds to me like some of you have issues with F/O's in your own company. Why not approach your Chief Pilot about it rather than bemoaning the fact on a public forum, and tarring all of us with the same brush. No doubt some journalist out there is loving this!!
Kak Klaxon,
Now put that FO with a line capt who wants to delay flap or gear extension for any number of sound reasons not stated in the part A or B and you end up with a possible break down in CRM,i.e FO thinks the capt is a cowboy and does not know his sops, capt thinks the fo should go ****.
I'm afraid that the fault there is solely the Captain's old boy. SOP's exist to stop one guy of the 2 thinking he knows best and doing things off his/her own back. If you weren't aware it's called multi-crew and CRM. Notice that there seem to be a lot fewer human-error induced accidents and incidents (and thankfully deaths) nowadays than, say, 20 years ago. It's not a coincidence!!!