Originally Posted by poorwanderingun
A facile response.... of course nobody is born with experience... but hat experience should be gained hard time without putting the lives of paying passengers at risk. Give me an FO who's been flying night-freight out of vermont through a couple of winters on a Bandit anytime over some classroom qualified wanabee when things are going pearshaped on a crappy night.
I understand where you're coming from, but let's try to be entirely honest here: how much does that Bandit really have in common with a CRJ, besides that both are airplanes? How much does night single-pilot work have in common with a 121 crew environment? How much does freight flying in Vermont (or South Dakota, or Arkansas, or insert your favorite hell-hole here) really have in common with flying a transport aircraft out of place like JFK or BOS or DCA?
I came to the airline after over a year of flying a turboprop, and what I struggled with was getting over the whole single-pilot mentality. The airplane wasn't the problem, the systems were no big deal. Getting used to being part of a crew was. Now imagine if I had 5,000 hours in the Bandit or a King Air doing all that freight flying. I submit to you the transition would have been even harder, not easier.
There is experience and then there's relevant experience. There is a reason why JAL, Lufthansa, Singapore, and many other big-time carriers pick up people with 200-250TT. It's to teach them the airline way from the outset. That way they are not reverting back to the Bandit and night freight while in the right seat of a 744. And those carriers have an exemplary safety record. That tells me that not all low-time pilots are created equal.
Besides, I fully expect to get to 10,000 (or whatever) hours and have fossils tell me that they didn't become a "real pilot" until their 14,546.3rd (or whatever) hour. In this business there never seems to be a shortage of people who get off by belittling others, with or without reason. Regrettable, I think.