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Flight 3407 families may face off against Air Force general on pilot experience rules
The Families of Continental Flight 3407 Monday renewed their fight to preserve pilot experience requirements they got written into the law seven years ago, but this time they could be facing their most daunting opponent yet: the chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. (buffalonews.com) और अधिक...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
US Military pilots are quitting the Air Force to take jobs flying regional jets for $20K a year? None of this makes any sense.
It's a tough one! Either a type rating or ATP should be the minimum qualifications before you start carting people around for profit. The good old days are gone where valuable experience was gained from student pilots trying to kill you every day! I can't say I am against a lower total time for new hires, 1000 hours or so but the prospect of foreign nationals coming to america and being processed through these "pilot puppy mills" and sent back to Ie: India, Pakistan, Africa etc., with 250 hours and a shiny new commercial licence sitting in the right seat of an Airbus or Boeing is scary! The idea that so many pilots are needed and fast, causes too great a speed of upgrading out of necessity rather than experience. Jet Airways B737-800, comes to mind recently where neither monkey up front knew anything about the pressirization system or how to read a checklist, and that is on one of the easiest aircraft to fly. The Military gets a hold of you and doesn't let go until you are trained. Then you just have to spend a couple of years unlearning the yanking and banking because you forgot there were 300 people behind you........smooth is the answer, but definitely doable.
Can't see how the Air Force is for lowering requirements seeing they would want hours requirements raised instead of lowered so that they could retain more pilots. Insurance agencies are normally the main pusher for more hours as requirements. Of course we won't be seeing recurrency check rides in actual aircrafts since that would cost money and aircraft time. Having the hours also doesn't guarantee the pilot has a grasp enough to handle what starts or causes an accident. Like mentioned even the best pilots can make the error leading to major trouble.
The first officer of Air France 447, Pierre-Cédric Bonin had almost twice the amount of hours required by the standing law, yet he made a very similar mistake as the Colgan air crew in an Airbus A330, which ended up killing him and 227 other people. It's not the lack of training that's the problem, it's the lack of stall training, particularly in airliners, that should be pointed to. If I were the one making the rules in 2010 or whenever, I would set greater focus on stall training in both CRM and type rating training.
Total agreement:
What I see is that the aviation community is trying to make up for the lack of experience with more automation in the cockpit. I think that sometime in the not to distant future we will see one pilot in the cockpit of the commercial airlines. I had a retired heavy airline pilot refer to the AirBus as the ScareBus due to the high level of automation and machine decision making ... he preferred Boeing products.