Originally Posted by truckdriver
The P2F has simply made you bypass the rest.
I have 15,364 hours of flight in my electronic logbook today. All accident and injury free, knock on wood. We are all exposed to accidents though, I pray my career continues like this.
After obtaining my multi-twin IFR, I worked for a number of different companies on Cessnas 206, 207, 210, 310, 337 and 404, on Piper Aztecs and Navajos, on Beechcraft 18, 23, and 55, on AeroCommander 500 and 685, on C-46, on Embraer 110, and on Metroliner. Then I was hired on jets and flew Boeing 737, 757, and also flew Airbus 310 and 330.
In the course of my career I had 5 in flight engine failures, I lost a prop blade in flight, had several electrical failures, one electric fire, had a scary flap asymmetry incident on approach, a communications failures where I used the light instructions from the tower. I lost airspeed indication in flight, lost vacuum pumps, magnetos, generators, got caught several times in IMC at night in thunderstorms without airborne RADAR. I did several manual gear extensions. I had a cabin heater failure at night at -35 and landed nearly frozen. I began flying before GPS was available using mapping, dead reckoning, Radar Mapping,and old fashioned ground-based radio navigation. I flew hundreds of Instrument approaches, including ILS, BC, VOR, and NDB, often in non radar environment, much of it in single pilot IFR flying. I had a frightening out of stab trim experience at night, followed by a out of trim manually flown BC approach that I will never forget. I had days where I performed several full non precision approaches down to minimums in a single day and I also had days where I did two or three missed approaches in a single day. I was sometimes frightened by captains I had little confidence in.
All of this occurred before I ever laid a hand on my first jet, during my first 6500 hours of flight.
What I have just described is "the Rest" that I would have bypassed had I gone the P2F route that some pilots feel is necessary to their career. "The rest" in question made me the pilot that I became and I do not think that it would have served me, my employer, my crew-members or my passengers had I skipped that part of my career and gone straight from flight school to large jets.
The French gentleman who was at the controls of Air Asia was at his first ever job. He was hired with zero experience, although I read he had 850 hours of flight at the time he was hired. It however was 850 hours of flying lessons and private flying, all paid out of pocket. No commercial flying at all.
When a person with such little experience is put in the right seat of a fully automated fly-by-wire aircraft with all sorts of pilot-proof protections in his first job, his flying skills go flying out the window, just like the flying skills of the AF447 SIC went out the window when he too was put in the right seat of a A320 as a low time AF Cadet. He was certainly a master of A320/330 autopilot operation, but had lost his stick and rudder skills.
Look at the last RyanAir accident preliminary report
http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources...FB%2012-14.pdf
Commander’s Age: 26 years
Commander’s Flying Experience: 4,905 hours (of which 4,754 were on type)
4,905 hours TT - 4754 hours on Type = 151 hours on other types.
As a passenger or as a SIC, is this the kind of experience you want your captain to have ?