What is better - PIC piston or SIC Turbine?

[haaron]

What is better for a low time pilot, PIC in a light twin (piston) or SIC in a turbine twin weighing less than 20,000 lbs? Ultimate goal - airline.

[mattpilot]

SIC turbine would be better. You're never** going to get a PIC turbine/jet job if ya dont have any previous experience. And the only way to get that experience is to ride along as SIC. And the airlines wont hire you if you dont have any PIC turbine experience.

Oh, and lets not forget, your never going to get a turbine job if ya dont have PIC piston time.

Anybody figured out the pattern yet? :)



**i suppose there are always exceptions

[Thunder Child]

Turbine all the way............you only have to look at how airlines factor down piston time.

[Luke SkyToddler]

If you look at the Easyjet website, they factor multi piston PiC time and turbine multi-crew SiC time exactly the same, and they both rate higher than longhaul jet SiC.

[Thunder Child]

I think if it boiled down to just experience, the turbine pilot would get in over the piston pilot.

I can't be @rsed to check on easy's website, but I find it surprising that they're factored the same amount.........

[Luke SkyToddler]

Yeah well there's 'piston' and then there's 'piston' - if you went and bought a couple hundred hours of summertime beacon bashing in a Duchess in Florida, as opposed to the same number of hours of something like air ambulance, all weather single pilot IFR ops in a C421 or Mojave, they are complete and utter cheese and chalk.

[Broken Wings]

Haaron
Another angle is that PIC Piston (if plenty of Night/IFR) is excellent experience but SIC Turbine is Multi-Pilot ops and most airline employers I suspect will be just as interested in CRM as in your handling ability. I personally would suggest you go for the multi-pilot turbine and gain experience that way. I think you'll find it pays better as well! Good Luck.

[Luke SkyToddler]

OK then, SiC turbine with a reputable company who was actually legitimately employing you = great. But, if I was paying for it myself, and I had to choose between going out and buying some piston time or getting involved in one of these ridiculous American schemes where you have to pay $5000 for 100 hours of co time or whatever, just to ride around logging copilot time on their freight run, it'd be piston time all the way.

1) Because if you're really all that low time, I think you'd benefit more from the actual hands on poling of the aircraft in hard IFR conditions like hand flying circling approaches to minima, of which you can be assured you won't be getting much of in a two pilot environment with a hot ship and an experienced captain sitting beside you.

2) Because the CRM that's practiced in a lot of those outfits isn't too flash anyway, they might throw you a bit of 'pilot flying' in the cruise or on a nice calm day but you watch what happens as soon as the cloud bases get down or the crosswind picks up at night.

3) Because of the above, I'd say at the end of the 100 hours the single-pilot piston guy is going to have a much better raw instrument scan than the other, which is 95% of the skill that gets you through your sim checks (which are NOT normally done two pilot).

4) Because a lot of UK employers KNOW this and look down their noses at turbine time gained in the USA accordingly.

5) Because the guys tha go pay and the companies that do this, are robbing some poor American wannabe of what should really be a paid job.