Of course it's possible to hire people with very little experience and still have a very good safety record. There are examples of European carries which hire cadets and have an enviable safety record. Lufthansa for example. The difference is our training CULTURE, which is a sad joke. Our training system is a sad joke. And the standard product coming out from the end of the training pipeline is very varied with different individuals having completely different ideas about the same subjects. We don't have dedicated ground school instructors. Ops Specs instruction is given by line pilots who don't have a clue what they're doing and mostly waste our time in what inadequately little classroom time is alloted. The systems CBT course is a total joke and badly mis-connected with too little information. It will never come close to a knowledgable dedicated classroom instructor. And it only gets worse as time goes by as we don't have a reccurent training system thought by dedicated ground school instructors to reinforce the subjects and clarify new changes.
If you ask too many questions or make the big mistake of making any suggestions, all you've done is to place your own name on one of the many lists kept on the third floor. In fact, the wiser among us follow the advice given by many who have been here much longer than we have and avoid the nasty little man training manager with a reputaion like the pleague and never even walk by the office and keep our heads down year after year not making any noise.
EVERYBODY relies heavily on test answer material (VOL 8) floating around to get past the checking and testing events because they don't expect to pass based on the training alone. Such is our culture.
To those who defend our operational/flight deck culture... you are sadly mistaking if you think we have a superior culture which will save us from accidents. A culture that allows the words "non-standard" to ever be spoken on the flight deck followed by an action which is clearly not according to SOPs, is seriously flawed. We have that infection in our culture. We're STANDARD until it is decided that we don't want to be? At least twice I've heard those words spoken on the flight deck and it ended in an embarrassing way to say the least, and both times it was done by senior checker/trainers.