Of course, none of this brouhaha would have happened in the first place if the aircraft weight and licence requirements of the past had been left unchanged. The old Senior Commercial Licence was a little bit of a peculiar permit to fly and perhaps unique to South Africa. But its existence was more to give a fillip to the ex air force chaps than anything else. Those poor blokes really do absorb bad habits, if only by a process of osmosis. I remember an ex Rhodesian Hunter pilot with whom I used to fly. Every time we winged our way up to Salisbury in the F27; he was forever standing up on his seat in the cockpit regaling us with the reminiscences of one of his sorties over Rhodesian villages. Since his air force activities had mostly consisted of exterminating civilians, this did not go down too well with the cabin attendants who all lived in Gaberone. We finally took the wind out of his sales a little by convincing him that I had flown with the Fleet Air Arm and, as everyone knows, absolutely any idiot can land on a runway but, well a carrier and not with a harrier? That, to paraphrase Kipling, takes a man, old son!
Back to the point then, which is that irrespective of all the braggadacio of linguistic screaming and yelling that will probably greet what is a brave decision on the part of the CAA; it simply makes no more common sense to have an aircraft such as a B1900 flown by a lowly CPL holder than it would to permit single crew passenger carriage for hire or reward. To have arrived at the point where the subject even arose, let alone became a point of contention does nothing other than remind one that something, perhaps approaching an error of judgement, occured in the past.
It is noticeable furthermore that the minimum qualifications for left hand seat positions has been decreasing quite markedly in aviation in general on a world wide basis and seemingly quite noticeably in South Africa as well. This tendency of course becomes specifically quite hazardous when two crew of similar inexperience are placed together operating in the cockpit under conditions of stress and in a weather situation which might be less than suitable for a champagne picnic. This reduction in standards has been matched, parri passu, by the aviation construction business which has consistently produced aircraft which no more resemble an aeroplane of grace and style than does a duck billed platypus. Indeed, it might be true to say that, in general, today's aircraft are equally as ugly as that strange antipodean creature. In fact, the similarity between machine and mammal may be said to end with the bill itself. For today's machines that fly, as distinct from flying machines, require no more input or intelligence to operate than that which might reasonably be found in the hands of a small boy at a Battlestar Galactica pinball machine in an amusement arcade.
In an effort to carry these helpful points one step further, it might indeed be a most satisfactory contribution to the continuance of safe aviation practice if legislation were introduced to ensure that no appropriate licence holder could act as pilot in command of an aircraft required to be operated with two flight crew unless he had already accumulated five hundred hours of flight time in an aircraft of the same type, class and category as the one in which it was intended that he should operate as Commander. This would have the effect of ensuring that companies only employed as First Officers those in possession of an Airline Transport Licence so that after the requisite five hundred hours flying, effectively as Commander and Captain, a transition from right hand seat to that on the left could smoothly be made. This policy was pursued by Bristow's in Nigeria on the Dornier 328 turbo props and jets and the system worked well. It would also ensure that Commercial Pilots would of necessity be required to gather greater experience of aviation at the instructional and basic charter level while at the same time affording a well deserved degree of employment protection to those who hold the coveted ATPL.
Addendum:
As an interviewing Chief Pilot of a candidate for employment who is the holder of a CPL and who has flown misguidedly in command of a B1900, one supposes that his time on that aircraft should actually be divided by a factor of two to compensate for the fact that he should not actually have been flying as pilot in command in the first place? That seems a fair enough!
