Guys not many people (if any) fly 182s then fly in an airline. The very high majority have flown multi crew turbine, and/or single pilot twin IFR. So cut out the speculation on this business of people going from VFR singles to an airliner. The minimum entry for the regionals is generally single pilot IFR twin. The issue is that experience is easy to get now and people are getting into regionals with very little total experience. Whereas 5 years ago you needed 2000+ to get into a regional airline.
The past few years I have discovered a new law in aviation:
The flexibility of the CARs is inversely proportional to the supply of pilots.
It's amazing how many so called 'laws' which where written in stone 3-4 years ago are now considered just 'nice to have'.
Also having low time pilots in airlines are not a problem, if airliners want to spent money on training. The problem is in this country airlines are addicted to experience pilots and build their training schedules around this fact. So they are now throwing their arms in the air when they can't get people through in the time frames they are used to. Everyone throws around the idea that Asia and Europe have low time copilots and we can do it here. Anyone have any idea how much money the Asian airlines spend on training? Can you see Virgin and Qantas giving their copilots experience in a Lear 45 just to get jet experience?
Airline management want to pay Asian type salaries yet none of them actually look at how much money these airlines spend on training. Just another example of how in Australia pilots subsidise the system