Originally Posted by
DA2000EX
It is all crazy and it's not isolated to Oz. However an ATPL skill test in a multi-crew environment as a PIC... having never been a PIC seems outrageous. But it's hoops and I would probably suggest that whatever era you started flying in, there have always been hoops....
You don't even need to act as PIC! I did the entire thing in the right seat, and whilst ostensibly I was 'in command', I just did everything as per our SOPs and behaved in no way differently than a line flight. The Captain still ran the show as always.
Its a farce, an enormously expensive, redundant and pointless farce. When you read the MOS, the competencies required to be demonstrated between the ATPL flight test and a normal IPC are the same.
Except for taxiing. I had to demonstrate that I could taxi. My aircraft didn't have a tiller on the copilot side. So he made me turn off nosewheel steering and taxi via castering.
If it wasn't for the fact it cost me 5 figures I'd be laughing.