Disagree. The biggest culprits are in the UK.

No relation between safety and P2F. Really ?
 

Some people have stated here that there is no relation between aircraft safety and P2F. That is one of the most ridiculous statements I have read here.

Imagine this:

Air Traffic Control school in South London is accepting applications. If you pass the medical exam and all the course exams, (and pay 150,000 pounds), you be provided with an Air traffic Control Licence and be guaranteed a job at London Approach Control Center. No interview, psychological or aptitude exams required. For only 100,000 Pounds, you can also get a job in Newcastle tower.

The Royal Navy is accepting applications for it future F-35 pilots. No exams, no aptitude tests, no contests. Just a physical and you pass all the courses The cost is 1.5 million pounds.

Jokes put aside, look at the last three accidents that LionAir from Indonesia had. The last two had low time P2F pilots at the controls. A bounced landing with tail strike and other damage, the other crashed in the ocean after proceeding beyond the MAP when they were not visual. The third to last, a runway overrun, had the PIC at the controls but a 750 hour P2F SIC in the right seat.

The recent Air Asia accident? That French pilot was hired with no prior commercial flying experience. It was his first flying job. Why does an Indonesian airline put a zero experience 40+ year old pilot at the controls of an Airbus 320 if its not P2F? Were there no inexperienced Indonesians to put there in his place?

Would any of these accidents have occurred with two experienced pilots at the controls ? There is a direct relation between P2F and accidents, its just that it has so far been covered up.

Some will bring up the AF447, which was not P2F but still involved a 250 hour pilot that was hired and put in the right seat of an Airbus 320, later upgraded to the A330.

It is not by accident that 2 pilots are required in the flight deck. There is always an experienced captain who is ultimately responsible for the aircraft but his second in command is not just there to fulfill a regulatory requirement. He is there to be a second pair of eyes, a second pair of ears, and especially a second brain, because the experienced Captain can make a mistake, he can misinterpret a clearance, he can be stressed or under duress, or have a sick child at home. What kind of backup can a 250 hour P2F SIC provide such a captain when he is in error ? Will he even dare ? Will the captain listen to him, considering his known lack of experience. My employer hires new pilots that have a minimum of 4000 hours. When my brand new SIC tells me something I listen, because he is not a new pilot, he is just new in my company. He had thousands of hours of experience flying other aircraft before joining me in the flight deck of my Airbus 330, or B-737 or whatever I was flying. I am not afraid of leaving this new pilot alone in the flight deck to go to the washroom. I can leave him at the controls while we do any kind of takeoff and approaches (except Low Vis Take off and CAT II and III because of regulations).

Who think will eventually put a stop to this ? The insurance companies. When they finally understand what is happening, how much it is costing them, and begin to specify what kind of pilots they will require in the aircraft they insure. They have done it in the past to certain companies, they will do it again when P2F is finally fingered as the culprit in a number of expensive claims. I am doing my share and hope some insurers read this and go back and look at what they have been spending and why.

Two excellent and spot on posts Gilles Hudicourt. For some reason the experience of pilots involved in incidents is never mentioned in the UK press reports of accidents. We have had a couple of runway mishaps here in the last month or so.

No safety concerns between P2F and safety? Who said that?

Theoretically, it could be very safe. But that's because theoretically a person with a lot of natural ability could go down that route.

The reality, however, is different.

Because the CPL is a basic flying qualification and ATPL exams are easy, any person of average ability can gain the required licences to apply for a TR plus 500 hours course. All they need is money. So, yeah, I'd agree with Gilles that P2F is a safety concern because airline imposed recruitment standards are too low.

Yet, I'd venture to suggest that the likes of AirAsia and Lion would be having over-runs irrespective of the use of P2F cadets. The reality is that the environmental and cultural conditions in that part of the world are demanding and there are a lot of poor pilots flying for those operators for whom the use of P2F is merely a slice of an otherwise poisonous pie.

Thankfully, the likes of the European low-cost airlines are not in this category because they are able to sift through all the chaff in order to find the wheat. To back this up they generally have good initial and recurrent training regimes and robust SOPs. Their safety records speak for themselves.

Gilles Hudicourt:

Unfortunately the basis of your argument is wrong. I too agree P2F is the cancer of this business, however to claim that the people who do P2F are not made to jump trough the same hoops are wrong.

Many of the P2F schemes I have heard about, don't simply allow you in just because you have a licence and the money!
You still need to pass normal selection tests, normal sim sessions, OPC, LPC, Line checks etc.

The P2F has simply made you bypass the rest.

I have heard of P2F guys being chopped for not being good enough, failing to meet required standards. One of the guys I heard about was doing it for Lion Air via Eagle Jet.

So the argument that they are given an automatic pass inside just because they have paid is not correct.

You could claim the same about guys "buying themselves in" via flight schools like CTC, morally there is not much difference, as they are massively overpaying the flight school, but with a "guaranteed" job at the end of the line.

The maths does not work out very different if you consider what CTC cadet pays and gets paid in his first "guaranteed" job.

Some of these flight schools have now cornered the market, making it very difficult for pilots to get inside unless they have experience.

I would think a modular pilot training incl. TR and line training P2F, would probably cost the same as a CTC integrated pilot training with a job attached to it incl. the first 500 of line training with partner airline.

So attacking one minority, does not really hold grounds, unless you put the whole industry under scrutiny.

And with the increased popularity of the MPL with some airlines, you are opening a new can of worms!

Well, could it possibly be?

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/airasia-je...--finance.html

According to the family the co-pilot had been in flying there for 3 years.. thats a hell of a long PTF:bored:

Yes I believe he had some 2200 hours but did he "buy" the job?

What about airlines who pay for the TR, isn't it a competitive disadvantage with those who hire P2F?
P2F can only be dragging down the industry to the bottom.

Obtaining a license gives you a privilege, airlines hire you so that A/C can fly. The system is all gone :mad:

They day airlines will admit P2F is hurting the business model as a whole, they will stop hiring P2F and places like eaglejet will disappear I hope.

How can a P2F eat and sleep adequately before flights without decent money?

Calm down, Superfly, this isn't all about you,! No doubt many of those who have chosen/been forced down the p2F route are perfectly able. That doesn't make it a great idea, either for the travelling public or for the piloting profession. Aside from anything else, it's simple human nature to place little value on something that was free -whether it's a pilot or a disposable plastic bag!

Let's talk about "The Rest"
 

I have 15,364 hours of flight in my electronic logbook today. All accident and injury free, knock on wood. We are all exposed to accidents though, I pray my career continues like this.

After obtaining my multi-twin IFR, I worked for a number of different companies on Cessnas 206, 207, 210, 310, 337 and 404, on Piper Aztecs and Navajos, on Beechcraft 18, 23, and 55, on AeroCommander 500 and 685, on C-46, on Embraer 110, and on Metroliner. Then I was hired on jets and flew Boeing 737, 757, and also flew Airbus 310 and 330.

In the course of my career I had 5 in flight engine failures, I lost a prop blade in flight, had several electrical failures, one electric fire, had a scary flap asymmetry incident on approach, a communications failures where I used the light instructions from the tower. I lost airspeed indication in flight, lost vacuum pumps, magnetos, generators, got caught several times in IMC at night in thunderstorms without airborne RADAR. I did several manual gear extensions. I had a cabin heater failure at night at -35 and landed nearly frozen. I began flying before GPS was available using mapping, dead reckoning, Radar Mapping,and old fashioned ground-based radio navigation. I flew hundreds of Instrument approaches, including ILS, BC, VOR, and NDB, often in non radar environment, much of it in single pilot IFR flying. I had a frightening out of stab trim experience at night, followed by a out of trim manually flown BC approach that I will never forget. I had days where I performed several full non precision approaches down to minimums in a single day and I also had days where I did two or three missed approaches in a single day. I was sometimes frightened by captains I had little confidence in.

All of this occurred before I ever laid a hand on my first jet, during my first 6500 hours of flight.

What I have just described is "the Rest" that I would have bypassed had I gone the P2F route that some pilots feel is necessary to their career. "The rest" in question made me the pilot that I became and I do not think that it would have served me, my employer, my crew-members or my passengers had I skipped that part of my career and gone straight from flight school to large jets.

The French gentleman who was at the controls of Air Asia was at his first ever job. He was hired with zero experience, although I read he had 850 hours of flight at the time he was hired. It however was 850 hours of flying lessons and private flying, all paid out of pocket. No commercial flying at all.
When a person with such little experience is put in the right seat of a fully automated fly-by-wire aircraft with all sorts of pilot-proof protections in his first job, his flying skills go flying out the window, just like the flying skills of the AF447 SIC went out the window when he too was put in the right seat of a A320 as a low time AF Cadet. He was certainly a master of A320/330 autopilot operation, but had lost his stick and rudder skills.

Look at the last RyanAir accident preliminary report

http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources...FB%2012-14.pdf

4,905 hours TT - 4754 hours on Type = 151 hours on other types.
As a passenger or as a SIC, is this the kind of experience you want your captain to have ?

Aviation is not the same everywhere and therefore expectations should not be the same, it depends on where you are in the world.

In the UK (and most of Europe), we don't have much GA. We are a tiny island where fuel costs over 3 x as much as it costs you over in Canada. GA is therefore not economically viable here. Also, being a relatively small land mass our cities and towns are much closer together and not massively separated like the municipalities of remote regions in the US and Canada. We have a bigger need for transporting 100-200 people 500+ miles away then we do for transporting 10-25 people over the same distance or less. Our farm and food stock is transported by road as is most mail. We are surrounded by sea and sea ports all of which serve the country in one way or another! For these reasons and many more, smaller aircraft and turboprops don’t work as well for us as they do in other parts of the world. By my rough guess there are probably less than 50 Edit: 50 registered was wrong, I stand corrected but the essense of the message remains, at any one time there are over 10 times more jets flying than turboprops! UK registered turbo-prop or commercial 'light' aircraft flying with UK airlines today. Compare that to the number of jet aircraft of which there are over 500!

Therefore it is quite normal for a 200 hour pilot to come out of flight school and straight onto flying a large commercial aircraft because realistically that is the only place he will find a job. There are far more jet jobs available than there are instructing, air-taxi, banner towing, crop-dusting and dropping jobs put together. We just don’t have the aviation diversity to support the kind of “career progression” you guys look forward to and are so used to. It’s a different ball game over here. Also, the JAA fATPL course is a much tougher and more regimented pilot training course compared to the US FAA or ICAO/Canada one.

Well Superpilot, Flybe, alone has 45-50 Q400's. Then you've got Loganair, Stobart, Aurigny, Blue Islands, Atlantic and Eastern, probably others I've missed too. That must be 150+ turboprops and they used to be a great way to enter the airlines, get hands on flying and progress to bigger planes that provide bigger pay cheques.

Now things have changed and thanks to cadet schemes, these turboprop jobs are not as good a stepping stone as they used to be. Why take on on an experienced TP pilot (or regional jet for that matter) and pay them well, when you can take on somebody with no experience but willing to pay insane amounts of money for "tagged" training? P2f and its derivatives have killed it as a progressive career in the UK.

There are different dynamics in different countries.

P2F in itself doesnt necessarily weaken safety (although there are further arguements about the effects stresses and strains due reduced wages and high debt over a number of years)

P2F in its purest most transparent form hasnt been present in the UK for 5 years + (someone quoted 2008 on here)

P2F in its untransparent form (over paying for training and starting on lower salary for a number of years to secure a link to a "partner airline") is alive and well and has flourished in the UK in an extensive manner for a number of years

P2f doesnt create higher risk to flight safety, if a suitable training regime exists and rigid adherence to SOPs can mitigate all but the most unusual risks - which before anyone tries to counter the point could equally catch out experienced crew. As is historically proven and oft quoted on here

All that said. P2F doesnt inherently make the operation stronger nor weaker safety wise as can be seen in a number of examples whereby some british isles locos have recruited extensively in the less clear version of p2f.

And to counter that arguement nor does the more conventional route possibly via military flightcrew service and operating turbo props,

Safety couldnt and isnt It isnt the arguement or challenge for or against p2f

The damage it is doing to the industry as a whole however is a different kettle of fish. This is the only arguement available with regard to p2f. Put the safety issue to bed. It doesnt factually deserve inclusion on the merits and disadvantages of p2f

For clarity, I include all mentioned forms of p2f in my own posts the purest form and the more hidden version

FWF is on the money with one negative that p2f has brought to the party, and remains to do so.

It has become more normal of late, but you do not have to go that far back into the past to realise that this progression was certainly not the norm. Today it has been driven in by economics, the 200 hour cadet is cheap to employ.

Really? We did in the, not too distance, past. The reason there is less of it now is because you can by-pass it by buying your way into that jet job at Ryanair et al. The career progression route, such as instructing then to turboprops then to jets has been blocked by the likes of Ryanair, who look towards 200 hour cadets rather than more experienced pilots. The career progression route has been destroyed by the 200 hour cadets going direct to jets.

Spot on.

Naive and a bit arrogant. Europe is a big place and certain EASA states certainly do not have the same standards of training, even though they are supposedly training to the same system. Here too there seems to be a race to the bottom.

Ask yourself this. Will there come a point where rich and able candidates for p2f start to run dry, especially as the airline industry continues to lose its status? And the airlines are left to choose from the rich, but less able candidates. Will they abandon p2f because the standards of applicant have decreased? Or will they choose to lower their selection standards. After all, it is a very cheap way of getting pilots, and modern jets are really really safe and are difficult to crash...aren't they????

I don't know who flies them, but the UK civil aircraft register lists:

BA ATP = 17
ATR 42/72 = 8
Twin Otter = 6
Q400 = 45
Beech 1900 = 3
Saab 340/2000 = 30
Dornier 228 = 3
Dornier 328 = 5
JetStream 31/41 = 30
Metroliner = 1
Short 360 = 1
PC-12 = 1
Lockheed Electra = 2

Total Commuter type or large turboprops = 152

Then there are 40 Islanders, 38 Piper Navajos, 77 Cessna Citation, 8 BAE-125s, 16 Bombardier Exec jet, 10 Lear jets, 24 Beech 200/300, 12 GulfStream jets.....

In a few minutes of searching the UK civil aircraft register, I have listed over 350 UK registered aircraft that are flown by professional pilots.

There are also about 150 lighter commuter jets such as the Emb 135/145/175/195 and the CRJs.

That comes up to over 500 professionally flown aircraft without counting a Boeing or an Airbus. There are probably many others.

Not to mention that this is just the UK. All of the EU is open to UK pilot as far as I know.....

Ask yourself this. Will there come a point where rich and able candidates for p2f start to run dry, especially as the airline industry continues to lose its status? And the airlines are left to choose from the rich, but less able candidates. Will they abandon p2f because the standards of applicant have decreased? Or will they choose to lower their selection standards. After all, it is a very cheap way of getting pilots, and modern jets are really really safe and are difficult to crash...aren't they????

Paul Frank, good spot on my inherent rambling....

To answer your question relating to my own post.

I guess one option could be to expect the new low salary captains, who exercised their option to "buy a training role " via the "tagged trainer scheme" with the "preferred fto" could be expected to take up the slack.

Maybe I shouldnt have put that into print. Anyone know if I can patent that idea?

In fact on reflection wheres the delete button, forget I mentioned it.

Gilles Hudicourt - First I agree your experience and career progression is as it should be.

If you think P2F is bad and lacking experience, then you should review some of the new cadets coming trough integrated flight schools!

As some mentioned the market in Euro-Land is very different then other countries, GA is expensive, and there is no gentle progression trough various levels of jobs!

It's to expensive for the Lo-Co's to have experienced FO's working for them, only when they lacking Captains they discover this.

I talked few weeks ago with a line trainer who had a cadet with total time of 90 hours, from MPL course. Never one hours of Solo flight, and in few months he will be FO on the line with a major EU airline.

So in that context the whole discussion of the P2F's experience becomes irrelevant, as the P2F pilots will most likely have more experience and more diverse experience, as the entry level is normally higher.

Again I do not agree with P2F, however to say that these pilots are less able then a Cadet gone trough a big FTO and put direct into an airline without any outside experience is wrong.

The training in many of these companies are geared towards these Cadets, and I guess the accident history within EU does not really show any increase in incidents or accidents, that supports that this is dangerous.
Europe is probably the safest airspace in the world.

I hope it stays that way.