Errr, my post has absolutely nothing to do with what you are talking about Flyboy :rolleyes:

Sorry mate - must have hit the quote button

Well lets just see shall we. Australia's aviation infrastructure is rapidly becoming third rate (not third world theirs is better) whereas in Europe ILS to ILS and plenty of suitable airports.

Oh yes. Aviation in Asia and parts of Europe are shining beacons of light for how to crew and operate aeroplanes.

So why does a captain in Australia suddenly need years of experience and several thousand hours? Does the sky work differently down here?

I can tell you the only reason why traditionally Captains here have high amounts of experience, and it’s purely supply and demand, and seniority.

It’s not a hard job geniuses, stop pretending it is. The sky isn’t going to suddenly fall in because some guys who have only worked at Jetstar for 5 years are getting a command. :rolleyes:

morno, how the **** did you get in to Qantas?? Wasn't there something in the aptitude test that said something about the necessity for 20 years of right seat ops?

It’s not that hard until it is.
Experience should teach us all that.

Much longer than 3/4 years!! BOAC/BA were recruiting 250 hour pilots from training schools onto 737/A320/757 for many years, and continue to do so.
Quite a few Concorde Captains started as 200 hour co pilots out of the Hamble College.

Yeah they are. I’d say the EU is a much harder environment than Australia. It isn’t just ILS to ILS. A lot of challenging approaches and ports (show me Australian airports that have risks like Skiathos or Madeira). A real winter with ice and snow to contend with, dozens of nations and cultures to work with and interact with with most not having English as a first language. And more congestion in the skies.

But airlines, both LCCs like Easyjet and Ryanair or legacies like BA or LH do it all with 200hr F/Os in the right seat of 180 seat jets, and then some carriers command after 4/5 years.

And we act as if this is something new to Australia, but the first Cadetships were run in this country in the early 60s. I’d guess that a quarter to a third of all Australian airline pilots today are products of some type of cadet or academy scheme.

It’s funny that the proponents of cadet schemes always retreat to the ‘everyone else does it and they don’t have safety issues’ argument when what they are beautifully describing is a normalisation of deviance. I’m not saying cadets are dangerous any more than I’m saying they’re not but it doesn’t make sense to defend a scheme that exists solely to undercut pilot T&C’s and to fill a supply problem of the airlines creation. If the career was so great they would have no problem filling spots.

It’s good to see the PER base reopening, it’s just a shame that QF chose to run such an amateurishly short term game, sure they can claim it’s ’just business’ but the damage they did to families cannot be ignored. They really need to stop pretending to give a fvck about the mental health of their employees because it’s clear they don’t.

exactly, that is what drives me mad, Qantas speaks about mental health etc but we’re quite happen to destroy lives during Covid and in a very blunt way. I got a ‘sign the variation to this contract by 0900 or be made redundant’ and that was after asking for 24 hours to look it over, not to mention the threat of closing our airline every time we dare to ask for an improvement in conditions and of course the multiple families effected by unnecessary base closures etc. then you get the nice, ‘don’t forget to look after your mental health’ emails…… GASLIGHTING at its finest.

It must do, who else has regulations that are "Strict Liability" with an attached penalty of X points at $110 per point?

$192.31

Always makes me laugh when people say flying in Europe is easy compared to Australia. Flying in Europe has real CAT111 Opes, Real Contaminated Runways, Metric Airspace in Russia, highly technical approaches such as Innesbruck, Steep approaches into short runways etc and of course it is not all ILS’s. What makes OZ so complicated is all self inflicted such as terrible airspace design, a set of rules developed in isolation to the rest of the world and terrible ATC and Infrastructure. Daily flying in Europe is infinitely more complicated than OZ.

Not called the Galápagos of aviation for nothing.

All this talk about here is harder than there is just rubbish.

I have flown in Aus / Europe / Africa and it’s all the bloody same - some is complex, some is painful, none of it is “hard”.

You’re a pilot - deal with it FFS. Stop the size competition.

Cadets are no more dangerous than non cadets - depends entirely on the individual. Not all hours are equal. Get over yourselves.

Which narrative is correct?

Cadet FO’s in Pilbara Ops normal, no additional risk backed by worldwide precedent

or

CASA's Pilbara Region Airspace Review draft document released for industry comment hasn't yet recognised the issues raised by all operators and failed to link the lack of Communications, Navigation and Surveillance infrastructure with the potential for reduced safety margins.

What he said, sums it up perfectly!

At the end of the day, we're all trained to standards set by the regulator and the company and we all have to reach and maintain those standards whether we're cadets or 10,000 plus jet pilots. I've flown in the sim with both and when it comes to flying a raw data ILS in the sim, there is very little difference between the two.

I have flown with both on line operations, in gusty crosswind conditions where you can certainly tell the difference. In fact one F/O who had come through the cadet program told me that they didn't consider that they could land at Ballina with a 15 kt crosswind from the LHS! Even a sim tech can fly a well flown raw data ILS in the simulator. There was another well known F/O whose mantra was "In my experience, experience doesn't count" The irony was they failed their command upgrade and left the company.