Good morning!
Back to the discussion, I'd rather hire a guy thats been operating a tail dragger off grass, within Class A, hand flying whilst talking and operating within one of the busiest bits of airspace on the planet. You may consider this less of a demonstration of ability than flying straight and level on one of the infamous 200nm direct to's you get in the US, if so then thats your opinion you're entitled to your own as is everybody else
As you say, this is very
opinion or
expectation biased. When I used to decide wether or not to consider an application, we were (and I still am) in the air taxi / executive business. Two hundred hours of instrument time in this environment in central Europe translates to 100 sectors flown under instrument flying rules. This means, he has planned one hundred instrument flights, has filed one hundred flight plans, has negotiated one hundred airport and/or airway slots, has had to collect one hundred loads of passengers or cargo, has flown one hundred instrument departures, one hundred instrument arrivals and most important of all, one hundred instrument approaches, preferably down to minima with the odd go-around every now and then. I can send a guy with that kind of experience straight to FS for his typerating and when I put him in the right hand seat of a King Air or Citation or Cessna 421, then he knows what is expected from him and will do his job quickly and effectively.
But when I see that his 200 hours instrument time (or instrument
rules time or whatever) were in reality flown on taildraggers from grass airfields, and he was only allowed to log them due to some peculiarity in the way his national authority interprets international standards, then he is not really useful for the kind of flying we are doing. Not without additional (time and cost intensive) coaching at least. And this is why we discard this kind of application letter, even if there is no suspected cheating involved in his specific case (as I have learned now).
Again, it's mostly a matter of
expectation.
Greetings, Max