Ladies and Gents,
I am a career biz jet pilot. I know that my side of the industry is terrified of what might come if training goes almost exclusively to MPL. Let me give you an example of flying single pilot in a multi-crew environment...
The aircraft have almost identical avionic and system capabilities to the airliners. The type I was flying at this time was a short haul (Europe only) 8 seater EFIS jet. We were tasked with positioning the aircraft for about 1 hour to a VFR only airfield. Picking up 3 pax and then flying them to Nice.
We checked all NOTAM's, weather and even phoned the tower at the pick up point to check the weather and make sure we had the required fire cover. This is because that airfield does not normally have the required cover for that type. They confirmed their weather and their fire cover. Off we set.
We left the airway and went to the AG operator at the airport. We were then told that we did not have the required fire cover because one of the fire men was late and they couldn't crew one of their trucks. We were told it was ok to land because we were just positioning empty.
This set up a massive problem because we were flying AOC, even when empty. I had to check the ops manual and get on the sat phone to operations and 'sort something out pretty damn quick'. Either get some more fire cover, get some sort of permission to land or divert to a closeish airport and tell the pax.
Well, my FO had only been flying jets for around 4 or 5 months and had maybe a maximum of 150 hours jet.
Had he been a fresh MPL holder, I would have been very concerned indeed. But since this guy had probably 2000 hours of instructing and MEP charter experience I was confident he could handle my plan.
I tasked him with flying a constant level circuit over the airfield and varying the width of the circuit each time so as to not annoy the neighbors at 9am on that beautiful sunny sunday morning.
He took the aircraft and all comms. Of course the auto-pilot was being used, but since this was all uncontrolled airspace, he and I maintained a keen look-out while he followed through on the yoke in case immediate action was required to avoid the multitude of bug smashers. We also lowered the second stage of flap and safely got our speed back to 140kts. As slow as we could safely fly to match our speed better to the predominant traffic in that area.
He had the flying and decision making skills for me to task him and trust him so I could liaise with our ops on the sat phone and with various ATC agencies on comm 2 to arrange a smooth and unrushed divert when the time came.
Great work by him and a great example of where the single pilot skills came in, even in a multi-crew environment.
He and I had a similar experience while avoiding CB's low level after breaking off an approach into an airfield that then closed to us due to the weather.
In my simple and humble opinion, there is never any comparison for experience. A new pilot out of flight school has no experience and now they want to make that even less?
Happy landings