You mean 96 hours of IOE isn't normal?
Good lord no.
Passengers should at least have two situationally-engaged pilots rather than dual given on a cross-country!
I've told this story before, but I'll repeat it.
I was called out on reserve one day to do a CVG turn. I was to fly out, then deadhead back. When I arrived, the outbound Captain poked his head in the door and said, "if you're still legal to continue, leave your stuff in the flight deck." I was, so I did.
On the way back, he explained he was a check airman, and the FO he was giving IOE was washing out. 60+ hours and he couldn't master the idea of "if you push the nose down, the airplane goes faster, unless you reduce thrust." He was hostile and resistant to instruction or criticism to the point of belligerent insubordination. His excuse for everything was "I've never flown a jet before."
Company mins for IOE at the time was 25 hours. Most folks managed to get it down in that amount of time.
Some of us could stand to linger in the right seat for a while. If that guy had made it through IOE... would you want him upgrading in, say, 18 months?
My carrier still has an infamously long wait to upgrade- the end result is even our junior captains have been around 10 years or so at least. End result? People know things- and they'll teach you, because they're patient, and not in a rush to leave.
That said, I worked for an 'upgrade mill' place once, too, and the captains I flew with there taught me a lot, too. Mostly that I wasn't so sure that jamming myself into the fastest upgrade I could find, after all.
You know what's wrong with the right seat? The pay. Otherwise, you're flying the same trips, and that's about it. If I was making better money, I could sit right seat in my current airplane the rest of my career and that'd be peachy.
