Contact tower ,
Where do they get that experience? Simple. They get all their ratings up to and including CFI. Then they spend the next year or two flight instructing. Flight instructing is one of the absolute best ways to build PIC confidence when one has low hours. Having to let and watch a student put a plane in a precarious position and learn the skills of when to take over is a priceless commodity that will come in handy much later on, when one is an FO or CA that needs to learn when to step in and when not. It also builds a lot of confidence in the early stages of one's career.
Then - after a year or two of that, one should progress to a more demanding level such as check hauling, night freight, air taxi, ambulance, etc. At that point, our pilot will have much more experience and confidence to be able to handle the more demanding aspects of single pilot 135 ops.
What I'm getting at here is simply that an airline pilot job should be the PINNNACLE of one's career, instead of a starting point, achievable after many years and thousands of hours gaining experience on the building blocks. Think of an airline pilot position as the very top of a pyramid whose foundation is built with the experience I mentioned above. Then, and only then, will your "novice airline pilot" be in a position to act safely as a Crewmember, the safety that all passengers demand. A 250 hour pilot freshly released to the line after an ab initio program is a novice in every sense of the word, and does not belong in that cockpit... I don't care how stringent the program is. There is no substitute for years of experience complete with a few of those "crap, I'm gonna die" experiences we've all had in our careers.
To suggest that a 135 job is a lot more demanding than an airline job may be true in the technical sense, but the airline pilot position carries a LOT more responsibility. However, a 135 job cannot be taken lightly either, and the pilot needs quite a bit of experience to move into one of these jobs as well.
You brought up AF447. Great example... Here we have two graduates of a cadet-type school who had probably never been taught to hand fly a sophisticated airliner at altitude, who did not know how to properly operate the radar in a very TS-prone part of the world. Yet, they promptly put the aircraft in a stall and didn't know how to recover. And yet again, they were "properly qualified", having graduated from ab-initio courses that are so highly lauded. Now, I know that the Airbus-style cockpit and controls may have contributed to this, but again, there is no substitute for experience. I'd much rather have had two FOs up there who had "paid their dues " in the industry flying thousand of hours in all kinds of aircraft/weather, prior to being hired by Air France. And I'll say the same for Ryanair and all the others.
No, I'm not breathlessly waiting for an incident or accident to prove my point; I sincerely hope it never happens again. But I don't need to, because it's already happened, and will happen again. The point here is that we can take steps to proactively PREVENT it from happening again, and that is to require our novice airline pilots to have the required experience first.
The MPL is simply one step further down than the ab initio programs, and represents yet another step in the degradation of our careers. I have SERIOUS issues with this program. It is a recipe for disaster.
Guys, get out there and pay your dues. Get that experience that will more than pay itself off some day in an airline cockpit. Rushing into an airline cockpit is akin to rushing to an accident scene. There is no room for inexperience here. As an example, I had 1500TT when hired into the right seat of a regional airliner, the Jetstream 4100. I had put in several years of flight instruction, charter, air ambulance. And even THEN, it was tough flying and adjusting! Going to the right seat of a multi engine turboprop required EVERYTHING I had experienced and then some. Many times in the beginning I felt overwhelmed. I can't even BEGIN to think how a 250hr pilot would have handled it. Even today, with 11,000hrs, i am still using the basics I learned when teaching a student to land a C152 in a crosswind, in my 737 today. I ESPECIALLY use my weather experience as an air ambulance pilot, in my 737 today. All of that experience translates into the safest flight I can give my passengers today, and I know they're grateful for it. And yet, up until last year we were putting 250hr pilots at Eagle, Colgan, etc. We've seen the results of that haven't we?
I'll conclude with this: I believe that in the pilot profession in Europe and other parts of the world, the "new norm" is to pay your way to the cockpit. Thanks to supply and demand, in conjunction with airlines desperate to cut costs, the airlines can take full advantage and the result is what we have. Believe me, it is absolutely detrimental to the pilot profession and represents a big part of the spiral downward.
Last edited by aa73; 10th Mar 2014 at 00:36.