Quality flying

[BlenderPilot]

Quality Time!

I'm glad someone's talking about this!

To my surprise I have recently noticed that due to the fact that experienced pilots are getting harder to come by, employers are beginning to really take into account what prospective new pilots have done in the past.

A friend of mine recently got a job, and he told me that what got him in the door in the first place was that he had, Hot, Heavy and High experience, then his employer considered that "due to his previous experience" it was going to be easy to get him long line qualified and "ready for the job" (firefighting) he was competing for the job against people who had twice the hours doing VFR offshore or the tourist thing, and he got the job with less than the minimum 1500 hrs.

Some of the factors that I think are important to a pilots experience are:

Type of work, a pilot who comes from flying VFR in the GOM, tourist, of traffic thing at sea level in VFR, is not the same as a pilot who has flown in fires, has done sling work, has worked EMS, or had to deal with bad WX in difficult terrain.

Aircraft flown in the past, we all know that flying a governorless R22 is probably more difficult than a 206, but if have a pilot who has flown a powerful, fast aircraft he's going to have trouble if you hand him a 206 to operate hot, high and heavy. Some operators in the U.S. are afraid of UH60 drivers because they are used to just pulling the collective to get out of anywhere.

Terrain or area flown, some of the guys in the forum who fly in Africa know that if they mess up their fuel or get a light, there is not many places they can go "just in case", there is not many ATC, WX facilities, and more importantly no rules to tell when/or how to fly or not, which means they have developed their own rules, or better said, learned to exercise their common sense. No SOP's, or checklists to follow.

Initial training being either Civilian or Military, military pilots usually have much better initial training and have been thru a selection process. (I have never been military)

Some jobs for relatively low time pilots that I think are good learning experiences are, EMS in places where terrain and WX are usually problems, Firegfighting, Longline, Hot, High and Heavy in not so hot machines, Ag spraying, SAR, etc.