Originally Posted by
Black belt
Can anybody please inform me, how on earth a so called pilot , can be employed into an airline, who doesn't hold a FULL ATPL with over 1500 hours T.T. !!!
I'll give you a few examples. Before I do, just so you don't think I've had it easy, my background was 10 years GA when it was 2500 tt (and 500 multi) just to get a look in at flying a 310 for Skytrans on the 'rock'. I received my 'FULL' ATPL when I hit the magic numbers.
We have quite a few pilots who were employed (around the 2000hr mark) with frozen ATPL's around the time of cutover where ATPL flight test was required, and the essentially the only reason the company will now perform the ATPL flight test is when upgrading to command. Unless ANY company owns a sim, they are not going to waste resources just so a FO can have a piece of paper. Obviously, any of our FO's can go and pay to use the sim and a flight examiner to do the same at the cost of around $5-10k (correct me if I'm wrong on the price here), but it achieves nothing.
I can fully understand where you're coming from, because I have been there when people say, "oh you haven't got enough multi-crew/jet/space shuttle time," but to make blatantly uneducated remarks shows a complete lack of understanding in how airlines are now both recruiting, and internally function. Additionally, getting on a cadet thread to bash cadets is clearly a waste of everyone's time. Perhaps your complaints would be better directed at the airlines themselves. I'm sure their HR departments would love to hear from you - I can provide some email addresses if required.
At this point in time we don't hire cadets either, so I'll be saving my bananas for myself. Back to the topic at hand.... good luck to those that applied!