I need to stress up front that we hire human beings, not logbooks, so certainly we are willing to consider candidates who have other qualifications that will provide an equivalent level of safety to what we ask for in our experience requirements.
Our hands are somewhat tied, though, by minimum experience requirements that are imposed on us by many of our customers. If a customer requires, contractually, that all pilots assigned have 1,000 hours or more multi-engine turbine PIC, we don’t like to make a habit of asking the customer for exceptions to the rule, unless the employee has worked for us for quite a while, and we are willing to stake our whole company reputation on that employee.
We generally reserve the very few copilot positions that we have (those that are not taken up by our single engine Commanders) for exceptional people who have considerable other experience (often non-aviation) but few flying hours. By way of example, of our last two copilot hires, one was a trilingual person in his 50’s who enjoyed a long and successful career in business, then retired and did what he always wanted to do since he was a kid – be a pilot. The other is a person with 900 hours copilot time on type, and 4 years experience working at FlightSafety.
Currently, we only employ 5 copilots in our whole company, and we are not planning to increase this number with new hires. At Zimex, a rookie copilot’s salary is 83% of the cost of the salary of a Commander with 1,000 hours on type. Add in the travel costs to and from the domicile, licence and medical costs, simulator training costs, uniforms, etc. and the difference in gross annual cost between a copilot and a Commander is pretty small – only about 8%. As you can see, there is no incentive to recruit new copilots. From a crew scheduling perspective, it is a lot simpler and easier to hire only Commanders, as we have sufficient difficulties integrating our upgrading single engine Commanders on the schedule as copilots.
If you are an aircraft engineer, with experience and appropriate ratings on the types that we operate, I suggest you send us a resume applying for an engineering position. The engineers are paid about the same as the Commanders. We permit internal transfers from engineering to flight crew, and vice-versa, with no loss of pay for qualifications when transferring to the new position. We do not assign crew to perform more than one function (flight crew or engineering) in any given year, even if the person is dual qualified. There is, therefore, no direct advantage to us if someone holds qualifications in both disciplines.