The following was written while 902Jon posted - interrupted by a phone call
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I'd say some more than 250 hours in general aircraft handling and navigation should be required to fly a sophisticated multi-engine AIRCRAFT in the first place. So a couple of hundred hours VFR (as a flight instructor or other jobs - although nothing is really ideal to learn the ropes... catch 22) help taking the focus off from getting the wording on your next radio transmission right, to more important issues - but having to learn everything at once is just too overwhelming and I don't expect anybody to just suck that information overload up like a sponge.
Again, hearing all this "need 500 hrs offshore experience" (for what? flying straight and level?
) and all that talk about the superior flying skills needed to fly offshore... that doesn't sound like the right learning environment to me?
...or maybe you are saying, that on-shore flying is at times as demanding as off-shore?
Both have its challenges:
- offshore: mostly weather
- onshore: mostly navigation & traffic
one could argue that rig landings are challenging (especially at night), but so is East 34th Street in New York with a 25 knot tailwind.
No axe to grind with the offshore folks, but this thread presented the opportunity to
question the requirement in europe to have a certain amount of hours to fly corporate, but not for offshore (or airlines for that matter) - aside from insurance requirements that is. Offshore - as stated earlier - the co-pilot is a
required crew member, needs to be familiar with all the complex systems and needs to be up to speed with everything to safely operate, meanwhile, in that fancy SPIFR aircraft onshore, he could just watch and learn with minimal workload
required by him.
BTW: I asked a couple of friends who fly in the North Sea, what actually IS "offshore experience" and what makes it so special? Except for the weather challenges (those we have here to) I didn't get a definite answer...