I am disappointed with the above 3 posts they reflect a modern disdain for experienced professionals
No they don't! I certainly don't have any disdain for a category of pilots that includes myself. Ridiculous statement.
Regarding the recent incident; we are still awaiting a conclusion from the investigation, so to jump to conclusions such as it was a psychiatric event is entirely unprofessional.
Yes perhaps, which rather begs the question why
you chose to resurrect this 7 month old thread with this seemingly (
let's jump on the band wagon) post:
Well it is again clear that in light of the recent events; Airline pilot experience is of great interest to the media and public. Testing is not sufficient to replace experience.
The reason that the public should have information on experience levels is that they have dropped to historically low levels and these levels are alarming. The testing is not fit for purpose as there is almost no failure rate which is a huge culture change from 20 or more years ago. If you were just to teach somebody to pass one of these simulator tests , you could probably have them reach the required level in a week from scratch. That would not make them safe to be left alone in the flight deck of an Airliner
Have they?
Long before I started in aviation, airlines such as BOAC/BEA (later British airways) and others, were running cadet pilot schemes that placed 200+ hour pilot cadets into jet airliners. They have done this for the last 50 odd years without it raising an eyebrow. I dare say there are many ex-cadets who have fulfilled an entire career and have now retired or have even shuffled off this mortal coil. Other airlines have had long established cadet programmes. I have flown with cadet pilots for the last twenty years without any particular difficulty.
The testing always seemed fit for purpose. The
ab-initio training usually provided an excellent base candidate, which likely explains the low failure rate from this group. The reality was that if you took the three main recruitment groups: Military career changers;
ab-initio cadets; and experienced career changers (self improvers), sadly, it was always the latter group that threw up the highest failure/re-training percentiles. This was in the days when that latter group mainly comprised 2500-3500 hour pilots.
Perhaps, instead of providing details of the hours, it might be better to provide the global marking scores each pilot achieved on their last half dozen simulator and line checks! I am sure that would provide the customer base with a more meaningful set of parameters with which to arrive at this sophisticated decision. I am still not quite sure how you would do this, or why it would be necessary, but I am guessing it might not be quite such a popular suggestion amongst some of the usual
howlers on this subject!
I look forward to receiving some more abusive replies.
I don't think you have had any "abusive" replies, although presumably you mean something along the lines of:
BS, every post you make indicates a vested interest.
