Nice post
studi. Sums up my views quite well.
My company sees it as one of their key safety assets to have a homogenous pilot group where 95% of all pilots are trained from zero hours. The trainers all have the strong opinion that thousands of hours flying in single pilot ops is not beneficial for multi pilot flying.
The major European airlines who run/used to run sponsored cadet programs also agree. This includes the likes of BA, Aer Lingus, Air France, Lufthansa, BMI..etc.
@Pilot Pete, some of your views are quite worrying, especially your last comment. You sound like you could do with a CRM refresher.
I'm not discounting experience gained flying single pilot operations, but most airline training departments do not view this experience as particularly important or useful, the major airlines seem to prefer to get young, intelligent and keen cadets and put them through a quality training school, operators conversion course, type rating and so on.., where the quality of training and performance of the cadet is constantly monitored and no bad habits are allowed to develop.
I'd hazard a guess that around 8 out of 10 captains in the above airlines are former low houred cadets with little or no single pilot ops experience.