I have also heard of someone telling FlightSafety they wanted to go from a 182 directly to a Citation X, and even though that is a two crew aircraft (so the person would be more or less "supervised"), Flightsafety wouldn't do it.
I had 196 hours in Piper Tomahawk, Seminole, Archer, and Cessna 172, 196 hours total in airplanes, when I did my Hawker 450 training at Flightsafety in Wichita, the guy attended with from my same company had 182 hours total time, and 2 years later he was flying PIC in a G4. I do remember they couldn't give us the PIC checkride in the simulator because you only could do it if you had more than 1500 hours to do it in the level D sim, but you could do it in the actual aircraft, in any case we both got our Pilot Inital Diplomas and the rating regardless of our flight time. The Citation X is of course heavier and faster, buy I don't see why there would be a diffrence in criteria from FSI.
Blenderpilot, why, from reading this thread "extensively", do you come to this conclusion?
Well in the aviation world I know there are no minimum hour limits to fly this or that aircraft, we have 24 year old 757 captains, helicopter pilots fresh out of school around here start out in medium twins, and after a year they are usually PIC's, I didn't see anything wrong with that, if the pilot had the right skills and knowledge. There are pilots with 10,000 hours that scare me, and 1,000 hour pilots I would fly with any day.
But if I rethink the situation, I realize that there are a lot of things that can you wrong when you have little time, for instance a new pilot might spend a lot of time looking at the gauges to avoid overtorque, when a more experienced pilot can pretty much by the power required to hover know where the power is going to be at when he's over the obstacle, older guys know how much power they are pulling just by the sound of the aircraft, and only a brief glance of the gauge would confirm.
I guess from an operators point of view, experience can save some money.