JAA vs. FAA, Training mills and 250 hr wonders etc.
First of all, Gulfstream has never crashed a plane. Not bad for all those little planes puttering around nine or more legs a day in thunder-storm-a-rama day in and day out, year in year out, decade after decade now, with minimum avionics and sometimes so many MEL red dots pasted all over it looks like the cockpit has measles! And yes, with Captains who babysit the FO's just like they do anywhere in the world when the FO doesn't have the necessary experience yet. And where is one to get experience? I'd rather pilots get experience sitting to the right of competent Captains than from school of hard knocks teaching themselves, flying checks solo in some Navajo at night in the winter as, someone suggested in this thread. That way, a pilot is just as likely to land on my house! At least the Beech 1900 is a plane which can be flown by one person safely, so that if the FO is indeed totally incompetent, the flight is not immediately in danger. And no Captain will long suffer a fool in the right seat, even at Gulfstream.
These people crashed planes at other separate carriers. Not all correlations can indicate reliable and valid conclusions. I wonder, how many former American Flyers or Comair graduates (also large pilot mills for example) have met their end in an airplane? Is the assumption therefore that those schools are also bad training grounds for pilots because three or four of their graduates ended upside down in the ground in the wreck of an airplane somewhere? The wholesale tarnishing of Gulfstream pilots is merely yellow journalism by some media hounds who know little about the industry, and are more interested in sensationalism and winning Pulitzers than fair reporting or doing the industry or the flying public any service.
It is a separate issue that Gulfstream was charged with doctoring schedules, and the practice is probably rampant in the industry worldwide. It is the antiquated FAA regulations that make the problem as bad as it is. The JAA gets my thumbs up on that subject, because at least in Europe there is more common sense in the duty and flight time regulations. In the USA, the duty and rest times rules are absurd. That is what the news hounds should sink their teeth into, but somehow no reporter does.
Gulfstream has just like all airlines, mostly excellent aviators, and a few weaklings. They are everywhere, and if you read the accident reports of many other mishaps, you will see that some poor performers do get through the system everywhere, and that is a shame. I have flown heavies where the FO had no business being in an airplane, but that kind of pilot is the serious exception, not the rule. It's sad, but no matter how good the screening and testing, there will always be occasions where poor training, poor judgement, and inadequate oversight conspires with fatigue, weather, and all the other usual suspects in the chain of events, that lead up to accidents. Then, there are the good pilots, who are sometimes the unlucky, or the tired, who are just the same, the victims or perpetrators of accidents. And they are everywhere.
I was a Captain and instructor at Gulfstream, as well as at other airlines later on. The first thing I wrote on the board on day one of ground school is "THERE IS NO RESET BUTTON". I know first hand, that my colleagues and I were anything but lax with standards, knowing that once let loose, these pilots were largely on their own out there in the airspace, with exceptionally challenging circumstances (who wants to fly through a squall line 5 or 6 times in one day at 25,000 ft?), and none of us wanted any corpses on our consciences. Many fine aviators worked there and still surely do, and many moved on to almost every great and small airline there is. The problem is not Gulfstream, it is the unfortunate combination of poor judgement, sometimes poor skills, circumstances (such as weather), and coping with outdated regulations which cause fatigue, a serious issue that is still swept under the carpet. And this can be the outcome of any training environment.
As far as FAA vs. JAA, I speak from experience also. Having done both, I can say that the FAA for all it's faults, at least focuses on what is important rather than minutiae, and the training and examination process there is related to the practical and useful. The FAA written test is merely symbolic, and the real test is the oral and practical as some have commented. The JAA goes by the assumption that if someone can pass the absurdly pedantic JAA tests, then they have the required intelligence to be pilots. About 75% of the content of the JAA tests is absolutely useless, and having 10,000 hours and 28 years in the air, if I needed to know how three quarters of that nonsense, I think I would have already known it! Anyone who has written the JAA tests will surely agree, most of it is merely a memory and intelligence test, and much of it has little merit in the real world.
And there are pilot mills all over the world, in fact it is the norm, not the exception. I recall that most of the "contract" FO's at Gulfstream were foreign. They now fly for airlines all over the world, from Holland, to China, to Brazil, to India, in fact, everywhere. It was merely cost effective for those pilots to do their "internships" at Gulfstream. I am not advocating or condemning the system, it merely is an observation. But until airlines all over start being compelled by the regulations to run clean and tight ships with regard to training and duty, accidents will happen, but you cannot legislate accidents away, that are the result of human nature, whether it is recklessness, fatigue, fear of consequences, or whatever. Everyone shares the blame; the reckless or careless pilot, the operator that milks the aviator to the limit of human physiological limits, the government regulators who are more concerned with collusion and appeasement of industry. And finally the customer also, who has got used to buying the cheapest ticket (you get what you pay for) which in a completely unregulated environment drives everything down, and the run for the bottom cost wise, will always result in inexperienced pilots, poorly or improperly maintained equipment, marginal training, and absurd schedules, all of which are waiting for fate disguised as unusually bad weather, mechanical failure, or a reckless or poorly trained pilot to contribute to the chain of events which leads to an accident. But as we can see sadly, even today, paying to sit in first class on the newest plane at one of the great airlines of the world still won't save you from a sad fate if the cards are stacked against you that day.
We should all endeavor as aviators to make the industry as safe as possible, but uninformed rhetoric by media people who are merely trying to sell newspapers to even more uninformed masses won't help one bit.