BlueMoon

I don't think it is arbitrary. You are flying for an Airline in an "Airliner" Therefore you should have to have an Airline Transport Pilot License.

Simple as that.

pete2800

The best flying I've done involved tailwheels... It's just more fun.

I agree. I kind of saw it as fixing a loophole. I'm operating a Transport-category airplane for an Airline. Which certificate seems most applicable? Hmmm...

Redline165

ALL of this.

As someone who missed both boats (low time airline hires and the "cheaper" ATP written windows) I can tell you that as a 251 hour commercial pilot that learned through an old guy i met at an airport I didn't know jack #$$% about being in command of an aircraft and certainly had ZERO business sitting in the right seat of a 121 carriers aircraft. I knew how to take off and travel from A to B in a warrior and when weather was crummy I just stayed home.

My first aviation job was with a turbine operator (yes, I got lucky) and I got to learn on the ground and in the air as a brand new pilot watching/listening to the more experienced guys and seeing when they went and when they didn't, when they told the boss no in regards to safety and maintenance issues, and when they just called off trying to get home and went somewhere else with better weather. When I was finally cut loose in the left seat I was still relying on the elder pilots for advise and asking what they thought for quite some time.

Through time and a few thousand hours of scaring myself for one reason or another I can tell you that now with around 2000 hours of TPIC time I know that I still (and always will) have a tremendous amount to learn. But today, as opposed to my wet ticket 250 hour self I feel like pending completing the training programs I could be a useful crew member up front in a 121 carrier.



Enough of my life history, Basically what im saying is that I agree with (for probably the first ever time on a message board) everything that has been said. Looking back at my younger self and very limited skill set at 250 or even 500 hours (with limited PIC time) I would be very nervous to stick my family in a jet with someone like me up there. It does suck for some of the younger guys who have been hellbent on getting into the aviation field but are getting discouraged by the low wages to start with and the massive amount of money to even get started. but I think on the safety and experience note that 1500 hours is not a terrible amount of time to ask for.

Nyflier

The standards are essentially still the same. It is the result of non-expert public opinion driving a change in legislation.

prex8390

Shower thought of the day: I was thinking about this the other day, in regards to how the 1500 rule might affect the accident rate in say Asia. With lots of students coming in from Japan/China/Taiwan to part 141 universities and flight academies, the rate of accidents might eventually go up, why? IMO because the quality of instruction they will be getting will be degraded from say a career CFI because lets face it, most of the CFI at UND/ERAU/ATP and all these fast track 141 schools are people who want to build their 1500 in the fastest time possible, so why work at the local airport where you get a 5 people a month, when they can go teach at big name flight academy in AZ, fly 360 days a year and zip off to SKW. Are those CFI's interested in teaching? No, of course not, while they sit there all day in the 172 watching stalls, steep turns, theyre pretending theyre in the RJ, so the quality of teaching goes down for all these foreign students, they go back home, with a poor education, sure enough there is now a potential i the next few years where an accident is gonna happen and they are gonna come back at look at some flight school in the US and talk about the low quality of instruction going on. This is all speculation and a thought that occurred sipping some beers, but I thought it seemed real enough to actually happen

block30

As far as 250 hours being the minimum for a regional, I got to see how that absolutely brain drained and trashed a few local flight schools. If a CFI was on property for 4 months they were the Chief Instructor. The damage from this took years and the stagmnation of the Great Recession to fix.

I think 250 hours as minimum for a regional is what exacerbated the "pilot shortage" around 2006/2007. This happened because the cadre of instructors was decimated very quickly, and any students in the pipeline got screwed. The instructors of that time all got regional or corporate gigs within weeks of being hired as a CFI and basically just mailed it in anyways... Why risk signing a student off for ANYTHING when you're out the door in two weeks, tops? So besides the brain drain, nobody seemed to care since every CFI knew damn well their instructing tenure was going to be really really short.

rickair7777

I was a conscientious CFI even though I was airline bound.

Asian pilot problems are not due to the quality of the ab initio training in the US...said problems are due to cultural issues, lack of basic airplane flying experience, and TAA FBW airplanes with complex failure modes. They lack basic flying experience because they are employed as systems managers on advanced jets after only a few hundred hours of stick-and-rudder training. That's a different skill than flying an airplane.

The Europeans have similar issues, minus the cultural CRM landmines. There's a reason US airlines have the best safety record (other than perhaps Australia, which is most similar to the US both culturally and with regards to aviation career progression...Aussies typically get a lot of GA hours too).

block30

Post Script

I'd like to thank the captain who wrote the letter to the editor about the "Unintended Consequences" article in AOPA Pilot's February issue. Please PM me if you are on APC, I owe you beers. If anyone hasn't read the article, I think you should. I may be able to paste it here in the near future.

I have been a strong AOPA supporter, and have stated as much on APC. But I think AOPA has been too much of a cheerleader for the regionals and has been for some time. This article is to me, a glaring example. At one point, the author Bruce Landsberg acknowledges low pilot pay only to say something of the effect that connecting low pilot pay with regional accidents is "sophistry." BS!!! The article further went on to degrade experience building jobs like Bedford would do. I was fairly disgusted at AOPA's puppetry and willingness to be a mouth piece for the Regional Airline Association.

I wrote AOPA my thoughts about their article, but my letter to the editor wasn't published. I hope we are all sending our thoughts along as this captain did, in order to fight back against the mountain of lobbying being done by the airlines.

gloopy

This is another crucial issue the big wigs just don't get. Yes they can get one particular pilot sooner at 800 or 500 or 300 hours as compared to 1500. But with as much demand as we're seeing (that is only going to increase) the system needs a lot of instructors to actually instruct for at least a year or so. As others have mentioned, there is a building demand already for CFI's and that will likely increase. It is no crisis for either the industry or any individual pilot to get 1000-1200 hours of dual given after they get their ratings. The training infrastructure actually depends on it.

FirstClass

With the previous rule, I suppose it was possible for a pilot to be hired on with the airlines without ever seeing all the seasons.