TO all of you making postings taking everything written in a vague report by a reletively junior reporter who dose not know all the facts, please give enough room for error in reporting.
Now the ground reality
1. Almost every airline is keeping a minimum experience of atleast 2500 hrs TT to command a turbo prop and 3500 hrs for a narrow body. This is for non military pilots
2. Now for the age, there are very small numbers of people who are actually getting upgrades in the age bracket of 25-30. this is because for many years there were few jobs. I would not put the number beyond 50-75 captians in all of the roughly estimated 1500 -2000 Indian commanders in the country.
3.Most of these small numbers have been flying in the airline enviroment for 5-7 years. They got jobs at the ages of 19-21 yrs and so are bound to have 4-5000 hrs by the time they get command.
4. Now coming to the age v/s experience. There are two sides to the coin. There are lots of military aviators including those who flew only fighter jets(mostly of the russian kind) who are taken as direct entry captains on the same airplanes. The cockpits and type of flying done by them over the 15-20 years of their carrers is not remotely close to the airline enviroment.
All you nay sayers tell me are these prople adequately equipped. These folks have a 300 hr training program which means they are released to fly in command with about 300 hrs on TYPE without any other commercial airliner experience.
(to be fair there are lots of them who are good yet there are as many who don't know CRM and are still on a mission oriented trip)
5. This is not the first time that market demands have got people upgraded early. It has happen in the very same country in the mid 90's too. i know of no mishaps due to the age.
6. To all those predicting doom i hope you are saying things like this only because of ignorance and silght misguidance by the article.
7. If what is being said in the article were true how could there be almost 500 expat captains flying on a total fleet strength of about 350 commercial aircraft all airlines in india included. (This is not withstanding my stand on the age issue and is just to give some facts).
Trining is the ket issue and as long as they don't compromise on that we will be just fine. rarely are times good for the pilot job market and this is one time lets make the most of it and let a few get lucky. now don't go getting jealous cause you had a difficult time moving up the ladder.