Regional Express Holdings Ltd (Rex) says it is concerned by a Senate enquiry's suggestions requiring all Australian airline pilots to have a minimum of 1500 hours flying time.
Rex managing director Jim Davis said there was no scientific basis that a pilot with less than 1500 hours flying time would be unsafe.
"If that were the case, the RAAF would not be entrusting our sophisticated fighter jets to pilots with less than 500 hours of flight experience," Mr Davis said in the statement.
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"In fact European and Australian authorities have officially approved training programmes that allow pilots to fly large jet aircraft with less than 100 hours of direct flight experience."
He said a minimum requirement of 1500 hours for airline pilots would mean the end of all pilot cadet programmes in Australia and make it impossible for airlines to source enough pilots to cope with planned future expansion.
"This would have a disastrous effect amongst small and regional operators as their pilot ranks would get plundered by the larger airlines as we saw in FY 2008 (fiscal year 2008,) when Rex lost half its pilots to the major airlines in one year."
To stay in operation, the smaller operators would have no choice but to accept pilots from general aviation, with sufficient minimum hours but who may not have the desired skill level to be an airline pilot, it said.
This would lead to the opposite effect intended by the proposal.
Rex said the Senate inquiry needed to focus on the quality of training a pilot received and not the quantity of hours flown.
It said the Senate moves followed a similar proposal in the United States that was a knee-jerk reaction to a fatal airline accident involving two experienced pilots who - ironically - had well over 2000 hours of flight experience each.
© 2010 AAP
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