Someone questioned how Capt Zaharie could have only 18,000+ hours if he joined airline in 1981 as it equates to 12 hours per week.
If you work on an average of 500 FLYING hours a year, then you would have expected the Captain to have 36 years' employment - which reconciles approximately with the length of his career to date.
That is 18,000 hours total flying experience, including his training and time employed as a first officer (co-pilot) before gaining a command (captain).
Naturally the hours he has worked in total, as with any job, will equate to far more than that. I think some of the low-cost carriers have a minimum working week of 55 hours, of which only 20-25 hours (at the most) will be flying time. The rest of the time is for briefings, preparing the aircraft and the time between flights