Are the BHNL aeronautical experience requirements for a direct hire expatriate PIC the same as for a national FO to PIC upgrade applicant?
Where does the national direct hire straight out of the Bristow Academy ab-initio program get the P1 experience to eventually hold an ATP? Do you need an ATP to fly as PIC in a 2-crew S76 in Nigeria, or does a CPL cover it?
Presumably the national hire comes out of the Bristow Academy with less than 100 hours P1 and they go straight into a couple of years of P2 time. Great experience, but the next step in career progression should be single-engine command time. One hour repeated a few thousand times as a co-pilot grand total everything experience is not a breadth of experience for the making of a well-rounded offshore helicopter PIC.
In Macau we had a similar national ab-intio training program, sponsored by the company. When the program first kicked off the company management was sprouting that the cadet pilots will be flying as Captain after 2 years. As far as I know, not one of the national cadet pilots ever made it to PIC in that operation. They had to leave the company, go elsewhere (some went to BHNL I think), gain additional experience, and sure, some of them then had it all together enough for the PIC upgrade.
I'm curious how the BHNL national training program might be doing things differently to get their direct-hire co-pilots to PIC status when others have tried and not succeeded.