Once upon a time, fast jet instructor employed by my local air force was asked, as we had no advanced trainers in the inventory, whether the students will be able to cope with moving straight from turboprop trainer to FJ. His reply:"Of course they will! In fact I can take fellow with zero hours and train him in the fast jet from the day one. At the end, he'll be combat ready but time and funds spent training him would be enough to see ten other guys get qualified via traditional route." So it seems that Grob-Tucano-Hawk-Tornado route is chosen because (among the viable ones, of course) it is the fastest and the cheapest (not least because it gives RAF the opportunity to weed out ones less than likely to succeed at a relatively cheap stage).
ICAO now think it is ok that budding pilots only need 170 hours for an MPL - with most in the Sim I may add- before they reach the RHS. Are they wrong as well?
Good MPL training might be far better thing than lousy integrated fATPL - this might be entirely dependent on school and supervising authority. Where they're dead wrong is when they believe that from zero to TR can be done in a year.
Therefore, why should we question the legacy carriers and any other carrier that chooses to put a 250hr pilot straight into a RHS or their jet? They obviously have faith in their screening process and their training.
As long as their faith is not unfounded, I have no objections.
you and I both know you can buy your way into an Airbus seat.
As long as TREs are doing their job, not. One can buy training but not rating.
Air and aeroplane are absolutely disinterested in pilot's total time, what did he do on his previous hundred flights or five years ago or what flightschool did he attend. They occasionally throw a puzzle at a pilot and give him finite time to solve it and they absolutely don't care how the pilot comes to the solution - from remembering the books, from remembering the tale of the wrinkled colleague who had to solve it decades ago or from his own experience. As long as the solution is correct, pilot lives to fly till the next challenge.
Ones unable to learn from anything but their own experience have to have good fortune in plentiful supply as they start their flying careers, lest they end prematurelly.