I completely agree with the fact that experience cannot be taught. We can indeed learn lessons from accident reports and so on, but real experience still cannot be taught. Its the many little things that make up the big picture and most of those little things cannot be taught. Training is there to give us a picture and an aiming point towards which we should strive, but how often does everything go according to the book? Seriously? There's allways something on every flight that is if only by little, slightly off. How to handle these things smoothely and safely is what experience teaches us. It gives us a working knowledge about things in our surroundings whilst training in most cases only gives us a theoretical picture and as such, is very rigid and unflexible.
I'm NOT talking about flexing rules, but as I said, nobody can do a perfect flight and because of the fact tha everone of us makes mistakes, experience is required to handle those small slips and misses in a safe manner. There's no training for this and this I realize after 270 hours in commercial ops. I've seen my own experience level rise considerably in the past 6 months and consider myself a safer pilot now than 6 months ago. Why this progression should end I don't know and I hope it doesn't. Hence, it should also apply to comomanders and their experience levels. But here comes the big BUT:
Hours need not be an indication of experience level. Depending on the environment in which these hours were achieved, the experience can be good or bad. Rather than experience to be summed up in hours, I would hint towards the number of landings. I believe the highest percentage of accidents occur during the approach phase of a flight and thus appears to be the most critical phase in which we need to focus all our knowledge, CRM skills and so on. A high number of successful landings I would argue, indicate a high level of experience.
Regards/ LnS