What are the changes?
"I have been flying for 10 years now...." after I had been flying for ten years I had progressed through a whole bunch of light aircraft, including, eventually, Highland and Islands schedules, charter and Air Ambulance, (single crew, all weather, night and day), as well as air taxi around Europe before getting onto a light turbo prop with a major carrier, flying in support of the oil industry in the Middle East and, lucky me, got the biggest break of all after eleven years flying I got onto a jet in the RHS with no prospect of command for at least five and probably eight more years. I have never, ever, regretted a single minute of it.
I was never a 'specialist' as many of todays younger pilots have become, with little real flying experience but plenty of system management time.
As aircraft and their systems advance it remains to be seen just how relevant a broad based aviation background with single crew command experience in all weathers really is. Why would leaving Glasgow in the middle of a winter night to fly to Stornaway, in a BN2, (no wx radar), on your own, to pick up a very pregnant mum plus doctor and nurse and then fly them to Inverness and position back to GLA improve a young pilot? I like to think that kind of flying made me better able to handle situations like partial loss of tail plane control whilst descending into Shiraz in a BAC1-11, engine shut down mid Pacific and a few other attention getting scenarios because I had already been out there on a dark and stormy night and had to work my way through it.
Has the time come when aircraft are so automated that my kind of experience is now irrelevant?