misd-again: by safety pilot, we mean a THIRD pilot in the cockpit. That would have meant 2 heart-attacks before I was left alone at controls, and this for 150 hours after having successfully passed an transition course and spent a full day shooting landings with an empty MD80.
But that's precisely the rub, you see: proper training costs money, and that's precisely what's not being spent anymore. There is no problem with properly trained ab-initio pilots. The operative words here are "properly" and "trained".
The point of my post was that a single fatality on the flight deck will happen from time to time, no matter how high you might want to set the bar for a class 1 medical, or how low the mandatory retirement age.
The essential safety factor is having 2 rested and trained people on each flight deck. No point in re-starting the tired old discussion about ab-initio cadets vs. "experienced" first officers, the two sides having shown many times in these fora that no meeting of the minds is possible..