PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Should Average Pilot Experience Levels Of Each Airline Be Public?
Old 9th May 2014, 07:29
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FlyingStone
 
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You can't judge crew's abilities only by experience in flight hours. I have no idea about the average experience of crews at Air France, but since it's a legacy carrier, I'd assume they don't tend to have 3000h captains. Compare their (temporary) LOC (Loss of control) incidents in the last couple of years to the incidents of LCCs (Ryanair etc.), which tend to have less experienced crews.

If flight time was really THAT important, airlines would only hire based on that parameter alone. But when you can find captains with 15k hours that have no idea what CRM even stands for, questionable manual flying skills and money being only reason why they come to work every day - the question pops out whether a highly motivated young captain with 5000h on 60+ ton jet (737/320) is really de facto inferior to all 15k-hour pilots? I doubt it.

Don't get me wrong, there is no subsitute for experience, but it's not measured just in flight hours and therefore you can't just list the airlines by crew's flight time experience. It is as if somebody would list airlines by number of incidents and forgot to divide it by sectors flown - an airline with 200 aircraft each flying 4-6 sectors per day is obviously more likely to have a f*-up or two in 30 year history than a summer-charter company with 5 aircraft.
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