This is all market correction. Guys getting hired into airlines with 300 hours is/was absurd. It's true that i would have done it in a heartbeat, but the industry simply does not support that. If it was not now, two years down the road the same crunch would have been on the CA side.
Sucks for sure... but i'm glad to see that it takes more than ATP mins to get a job these days. A return to the natural order of progression is needed.
Once, i was flying with an FO. His leg, empty. We were getting the crap kicked outta us in the clouds. I seriously gave myself a tattoo on my palm trying to write the atis down, gave up, and read it back to him. 15 minutes later, he looks at it, not remembering the weather, and says to me,"I Used to tell my students to write so that we could both read it" Just what i need... a low time pilot who is god's gift to avitaion, thinking of me as his student. Heck, even some of them cover the controls on landing... in an airplane which i have landed more times in the last 3 months, then they have landed total in any airplane. It is time for experience levels to go up, and Pilot Development programs to go away. It is time for people to really work to gain the privlidge of flying the public. I hope Jet U and all places like that go under.
Some of the people getting furloughed i feel bad for. These guys have thousands of hours in big planes... whom just lost their job. For most everybody else, this is a move back to where they should have been originaly. I did my 3+years of instruction, worked in diffrent venues of avitaion, and draw upon my experiemce daily. I would not consider myself a safe captain without it.
When the job becomes easy to get, it loses the respect it deserves.