Should Average Pilot Experience Levels Of Each Airline Be Public?

[Gilles Hudicourt]

Originally Posted by John_Smith

Quote:
Reaching deep into the recesses of my memory, but I'm sure at least one of the FOs had significant (current) gliding and GA time, so the argument rather falls down there.

It's the second time I read you writing this false statement. So I will set you straight.

The Pilot Flying FO, Pierre-Cédric Bonin, had a Glider Licence, period. "Significant gliding time', or "Regular" glider pilot, as you wrote in the other post is just not true. Of course you put a disclaimer in the beginning "deep into the recesses of my memory", so let me refresh your memory :

The BEA final report states he received his Glider licence in 2001, the same year he received his commercial multi IFR. Period. I never saw any other reference that Bonin was a current glider pilot or a glider enthusiasts. He had 2900 hours, most of which was straight and level on autopilot in Fly by Wire aircraft and lacked the most basic flying skills.

[Bealzebub]

I am disappointed with the above 3 posts they reflect a modern disdain for experienced professionals

No they don't! I certainly don't have any disdain for a category of pilots that includes myself. Ridiculous statement.

Regarding the recent incident; we are still awaiting a conclusion from the investigation, so to jump to conclusions such as it was a psychiatric event is entirely unprofessional.

Yes perhaps, which rather begs the question why you chose to resurrect this 7 month old thread with this seemingly (let's jump on the band wagon) post:

Well it is again clear that in light of the recent events; Airline pilot experience is of great interest to the media and public. Testing is not sufficient to replace experience.

The reason that the public should have information on experience levels is that they have dropped to historically low levels and these levels are alarming. The testing is not fit for purpose as there is almost no failure rate which is a huge culture change from 20 or more years ago. If you were just to teach somebody to pass one of these simulator tests , you could probably have them reach the required level in a week from scratch. That would not make them safe to be left alone in the flight deck of an Airliner

Have they?

Long before I started in aviation, airlines such as BOAC/BEA (later British airways) and others, were running cadet pilot schemes that placed 200+ hour pilot cadets into jet airliners. They have done this for the last 50 odd years without it raising an eyebrow. I dare say there are many ex-cadets who have fulfilled an entire career and have now retired or have even shuffled off this mortal coil. Other airlines have had long established cadet programmes. I have flown with cadet pilots for the last twenty years without any particular difficulty.

The testing always seemed fit for purpose. The ab-initio training usually provided an excellent base candidate, which likely explains the low failure rate from this group. The reality was that if you took the three main recruitment groups: Military career changers; ab-initio cadets; and experienced career changers (self improvers), sadly, it was always the latter group that threw up the highest failure/re-training percentiles. This was in the days when that latter group mainly comprised 2500-3500 hour pilots.

Perhaps, instead of providing details of the hours, it might be better to provide the global marking scores each pilot achieved on their last half dozen simulator and line checks! I am sure that would provide the customer base with a more meaningful set of parameters with which to arrive at this sophisticated decision. I am still not quite sure how you would do this, or why it would be necessary, but I am guessing it might not be quite such a popular suggestion amongst some of the usual howlers on this subject!

I look forward to receiving some more abusive replies.

I don't think you have had any "abusive" replies, although presumably you mean something along the lines of:

BS, every post you make indicates a vested interest.

[rogerg]

Its not how many hours you put in, its what you put in the hours.

[Denti]

Average experience is pretty useless anyway. For example average experience for FOs in my company is probably around 5000 to 7000 hours, captains somewhere around 12 to 15k hours. However, we do exclusively hire out of our own flight school which was actually the first approved MPL school in the country. Entry level experience when starting the line training is probably around 80 to 100 hours real flight time and around 300 hours simulator time. And surprisingly those youngsters are eager to learn and are actually pretty good pilots. Of course raw data manual flight is encouraged in my company and visual approaches, although not allowed in our home country airports anymore, are still a common thing and enjoyed by most.