I have a final airline intervirw soon, which I hope to pass
I wish you the best of luck for the interview!
Loads of airline hours don't necessarily mean much on bizjets. We recently had two FOs join about the same time - one had 4500 hours on regional airlines, the other had about 1000, mostly on MEPs single-pilot, and on gliders before that.
The ex-airline guy was hired because he had enough hours to satisfy the insurance requirements for captain, and was expected to make LHS in six months. However, it quickly became apparent that he had no operational savvy, having done all his hours P2 without taking any responsibility, and with an ops department doing all the backup, flying a few fixed routes. He was a flying robot, good at rigid adherence to checklists and SOPs, but unable to think on his feet when faced with the unexpected. In the end, the company didn't renew his contract.
On the other hand, the MEP guy was used to running ops himself, knew how to flight plan himself, how to deal with CFMU, how to save fuel, how to fly visual approaches, when to go VFR if necessary, wasn't the slightest fazed by going into an unfamiliar airport, and was happy to do the menial jobs like cleaning the aircraft and updating the jepps. He's ready to go LHS already, and just waiting for enough hours to satisfy the insurance. His fewer P1 hours on a MEP were far more valuable than loads of P2 on an airline.
Trim stab, I´d say that he was a product of his environment and probably his personality. I´ve seen airline dudes getting adjusted to our flying real quick. Its more the mindset IMHO, am I willing to relearn big parts of the business that I have been doing for so long already ? Or do I just try to find a mistake and blame somebody else than me instead of just making it work?
The visual appr. etc. are a different beast...you have got to learn these things by watching (IMO) no sim will get you there. Plenty of airliners do loads of visuals - e.g. the guys flying to greek islands etc.
Now, OTOH hand I had a colleague who was a captain for a long time in an executive charter operation that went into smaller/VFR airfields a lot and he was so uncertain of himself that he never gave such approaches to his F/O.
There was one airfield with a 1500m runway that we went practically 3 times a week and his 2 year long almost exclusive F/O was not allowed to land there a single time. I upgraded to the aircraft type and thaught: wow this F/O has like a 1000hrs, on this type, good thing he is here to hold my hand, he surely can show you how to fly this thingy etcetc. (I had enjoyed 'minimal' supervision...) How wrong I was.
He never learned the REAL important things. He was/is a better checklist handler/SOP knight than I ever will be...
My point is: we can´t generalize things like that...