I fly as an expat B738 captain in India. Out of more than two years here
I have flown with hundreds of 250 hrs CPL holders as my FO on B737NG.
Only very few of them did a god job and progressed as a pilot. With them
I do my best to share my knowlege and experience and believe or not I have learned a lot from them as well. The rest are not pilots at all, they are good at paperwork only. It will take years and thousands of hours for
them to improve if it's going to happen to them at all. I am not the only one, every captain here has the same opinion. This is a hard job to sit in the cockpit and watch the guy on the right all the time to grab his hand
when his going to do something wrong. When it's dark, bumpy and raining
heavily outside you are alone in the cockpit. You can rely on yourself only.
We call it - "737 single pilot operations" here.
To do this job the captain must be well trained and paid accordingly.
Do we like it or not, airlines will keep hiring these guys because they need
a cheap workforce to fill up the right seats. Experienced pilots cost more.
So there will be always extra workload for the captain and the safety level
can not be compared to the flight with a full crew.
By the way I did an interview with Jazz last month. To say the truth
I wasn't serious about getting a job with them. I can not survive on 37K.
I needed an interview practice. Well, the faces of interviewers looked happy. But in two weeks I got a standard letter saying that Jazz has too
many candidates to choose from.
Well, I think Jazz prefers the cheapest ones.
I have no intention here to hurt any one who got hired by Jazz.
Good luck to all and safe flying!
