Originally Posted by
Piltdown Man
We have a few F/O's who I won't leave alone. But they have thousands of hours. It's the fresh faced F/O's with only a few hundred hours are a pleasure to work with. But remember where the problem is. It's in the heart of EASA. These are the guys who are paid to think ahead, not look in the toilet to see what they ate yesterday.
I agree in general. I have only flown with one true low hour pilot who'd come from a cadet regime and he was great, however the company had hired him to try out their new low hour pilot training procedures and I think they made absolutely certain that they had a top performer.
Getting away from true low timers though, I tend to find that the high hour FOs, while solid, are generally not the sharpest tools and need to be watched carefully. It's not surprising as these are typically guys who've been overlooked for a command several times.
I think having set requirements such as 1500 hours is useless. Some pilots are great with 500 hours and some are hopeless with 5000 hours. The Colgan crash should have focussed the airlines on weeding out pilots with a history of marginal performance, the hours are of no importance.