I may have mentioned this before.....
IF you hire people with no experience at all in airplanes, you CAN train them to very high standards. The military does it all the time in some countries. Some airlines do it quite well.
BUT:
If you chose your candidates based on intangibles such as docility (ie doing what they are told and not being a s*** stirrer), who their parents are, ethnic background (OUR airline is piloted by kids from OUR country), or a past that involves no problems at all - in other words, the candidate has never learned risk assessment
AND:
You train (and haze) them for 300 hours in a 172, put them through an intense GROUND school, and then stick them in the right seat of a B777 or other large airplane.
Do not allow them to make cross wind landings.
Use a fear based program so that they are terrified of making mistakes, so much so that when they near Captain upgrade they decline landings.
Give them 10 years of twiddling the heading knob on inter-continental flights hand-flying perhaps 5-6 minutes on each of their legs - maybe an average of 3 per month. You figure how much actual flying time that gives them.
Fire them if anything happens.
Never let them fly with the autothrottles off.
THEN:
Upgrade them to Captain and give them an equally well qualified FO.
What do you think is going to happen the night an engine tanks on a winter Pacific Rim flight when the only en-route alternate is some windswept, desolate, and forbidding ice-covered Siberian "airport"?
The only option is to continue to destination because neither pilot can hand-fly the aircraft. Don't think it hasn't happened.
Last edited by Plectron; 5th Sep 2011 at 17:59.