They wouldn't be able to make a position report, but they would be able to hand fly a jet raw data.
Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. I left the regionals just as the first RJs began to arrive, I have no idea what level of automation they use. I can refer to the Colgan accident at Buffalo though. No auto throttle in a turboprop and they were flying on autopilot. He just needed to control the thrust. That is one of the examples of lack of experience I'm talking about. That guy had the coveted PIC hours and he'd slipped through the cracks and killed a lot of people. None of the airplanes we fly here were designed to be flown raw data. Certainly you need to be able to should it come to that, but your raw data flying skills WILL degrade flying our airplanes as they were designed to be flown. And there is one hell of a difference between raw data flying an RJ and a -8 for instance, that difference is mass.
I asked: Why is 3500 in military transports OK but you need 5000 in civilian transports? Aren't the civilians flying into the same airports in regionals and thus familiar?"
Misd-again said:
Everyone has about the same length of professional experience. So the TT's are different but the years as a professional pilot are similar.
Well sure, I understand military guys build time more slowly. But I'm not talking about total number of years doing a job, the thread was talking about experience. That should mean practical experience. Who has more practical experience applying at JetBlue? A C-130 guy just out of the military or a regional guy who has been flying into their regional hubs for a number of years? That's my point.
From Curtain Rod:
And because the military guys went through a ridiculously stringent selection and far more arduous training program than a purely civvy route, and were flying large transports right away vs. 5 planes later, and almost always doing more demanding flying with various special missions in addition to getting from A to B.
Well this is the age old argument to why military guys are or should be preferred. The selection and training standards. See above. They may come with a lot of practical experience or virtually none in regard to an airline. I've been 25 years in the industry now and I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly from both civilian and military backgrounds. Just because you were a Blue Angel (or Thunderbird, Snowbird, Red Arrow) does not mean you will make a good airline pilot. Looking at the JetBlue criteria in the first post why would you take a guy with 2000 hours of single pilot fighter time and no multi crew experience over civilian who might have 4000 hours (shy of the 5000) but its all primarily RJ, multi crew and some PIC time? Just a something to think about. Then you have airlines that train ab initio straight into the right seat of medium jet type equipment without the S/O stage. Should Cathay just beef up the training and do that? Guys coming out of the military aren't really the point of my argument anyway, because they'd have the same numbers for Cathay as they would in the US market. I am primarily discussing the civilian market.
My overall point is that experience is relative. What JetBlue recruits is not necessarily what Cathay needs. The people they are hiring are not necessarily "more experienced" they just have more time in categories that suit that airline's needs, type of flying, and type of equipment. And those hours numbers are market driven, they are simply screening tools. And not very good ones.