Trafalgar you're absolutely right. How stupid of me to think that we were referring to only a
specific type of hours when we use them as a metric for experience. I didn't realise that we could only refer to caucasian hours when equating the two. I sincerely didn't mean to inject a racial theme to this debate so please forgive me if I did so.
Just to get back into everyone's good books as to how useful hours are as an indication of experience can I put forward the following examples?
QF1. Total experience of the pilots in the control seats: 24854 hours (Captain ex-QF cadet; FO ex-GA and regional). If we include the SO (ex-RAAF), total experience on the flight deck: 31539 hours.
Southwest 345. Total experience of the pilots in the control seats: 17722 hours.
In all honesty though, these probably don't count either as the first crew were antipodean, with the accident occuring at a foreign airport and the captain of the second was a woman.
My point is, and always has been, that hours in and of themselves, are a meaningless metric to hang your hat on when deciding whether or not a pilot is likely to be competent. Logically, prior to the advent of cadet programmes and MPL schemes, 100% of all airline accidents and incidents involved experienced pilots so believing with such apparent certainty that "experienced" pilots will reduce the accident rate and "inexperienced" pilots will increase the accident rate is a fallacious argument in my opinion.
Clearly I don't know whether reduced experience will or will not affect the worldwide incident/accident rate but I'm prepared to have an open mind until statistics can prove one way or the other. Anyway, we'll all be travelling on pilotless aircraft soon so the whole argument is moot.
STP