NAFI opposed to 1500 hour rule

Re: NAFI apposed to 1500 hour rule

Firebird2XC said:
You're probably right. I knew that was true in my case.

I know I did okay, but I could have done a lot better, too. For every one or two of types like me, though, there were two or three that were choking on it and overloading their Captain.

Now that we're on the other side of things, it looks differently. Is it because our qualifications have changed? Not so much. Mostly because we've seen it from both sides, and heard from a good number of Captains about the FOs that nearly killed everybody aboard a few times.

It's quite sobering.

I note that you're probably below ATP mins. Do you think that colors your opinion in any particular way?
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Yes i am below ATP minimums and i am also disappointed that this new rule only makes it that much longer for me to pursue a career with the airlines especially with today's economy where jobs are not that plentiful. Atleast years ago when the industry was blooming you were more than likely to get a job flying something if you worked hard and played your cards right but today we have highly qualified people who can't even find an instructing job at a FBO. However, i am the type of person who accepts reality for what it is and as such i often do whatever it takes if the motivation continues. I realized that people getting picked up at 300hrs is not normal and i will have to pay my dues like everyone else prior to two years ago.

I also know a couple people who got hired with low time and still managed to do well, just like you. At the end, a lot has to do with the quality of training you received and your capabilities. Not everyone who has 1500 hours will fly at the same level, some will be better and some will be a lot worse. I remembered when i was doing my dispatcher's course over at flightsafety, i had the opportunity to fly the Beech 1900 sim and the instructors were surprised i had only a PPL (at that time thats all i had). It may not mean anything that i flew a sim pretty good but it did a lot for my confidence and i kinda felt i was the . :D
 
Re: NAFI apposed to 1500 hour rule

Well, I mean it IS a Beech 1900, the grown up version of the King Air, which is one of the easiest and best flying aircraft on the face of the planet. Really, it's a fantastic airplane, and it hand flies like a dream. You want a real airplane? Get yourself a Chieftain, get yourself an MU-2, get yourself a Metro, get yourself strapped onto a Lear 35. But get yourself ANYTHING besides a 1900, which is really just a big King Air, which is really just a big Baron, which is really just a Bonanza with two engines :)

Additionally, you're spot on about some people still not being able to hack it at 1,500 hours. I've seen enough guys out there that had 2,000 hours of time that were, quite frankly, lucky they hadn't killed themselves in an airplane yet.

But the majority of those guys either don't move onto the next level because they blow the interview, or they kill themselves doing banner tow. It's harsh, but there are some very real consequences to not being a good pilot.

The deal is that we owe our passengers a duty to make sure they don't suffer the consequences of our failures, and because of that the standards should be higher instead of lower.
 
Re: NAFI apposed to 1500 hour rule

jtrain609 said:
If you think I overdo it on the sarcasm, then you need to meet me one of these days. I am, without a doubt, even MORE over the top when you meet me in person and I think because of that, the sarcasm makes a little more sense after you've had a few beers with me. I've found a very large number of people from this site are the same. And speaking of, you want to see sarcasm? You need to hang out with fl22, the guy is hilarious!

But, just so you know, I'm not bitter about my furlough. I'm moving on with my life as if I'll never get recalled, which I think is the best piece of advice I've ever gotten about this career. With the way things are rolling, I'll likely have a recall letter in my mailbox within a year and then I'll have some choices to make.

I had 850/500 when I was hired at Express, though for a year prior to that I had been working at a part 135 company in the training department, and I'll say flat out that without that experience, I would have failed out of training at Express.

The other strange thing about my logbook is what you can't see, and that's an obscene amount of time teaching people in the sim at Amflight. I'm fairly certain that if I could count that time, and obviously I would if I had been in the actual airplane and not a box, I would have had ATP minimums.

But, such is life, and I still think that ATP minimums is a good thing. Would it have pushed me back a little bit? Maybe. Likely, I would have never left Amflight, which at this point in my career, would have been a much better move. I knew it at the time, and accepted it. I'm simply not enough of a type A personality to charge it so hard I hate my life.

Though the difference between me and a lot of other people is that flying is not my life. It used to be, and then I got married. Sometime between getting engaged and getting furloughed (about a year), some things changed in my life and I'm pretty happy with where I am now.
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Good post and nicely said. I guess i shouldn't have judged you so soon without first knowing who you are. I am a very sarcastic person myself and i often piss people off too but then i don't really care because if they can't handle my sarcasm and have a sense of humor then it's pointless being friends.

I'm glad that you're moving on with your life and you seem happy about the decision. Whether or not you go back to expressjet is on you but atleast now you've matured a lot more and have your priorities straight. All i can say is no matter how much you try to preach to people that they aren't ready for a 121 job with low time, they won't buy it. Learning is a change in behavior based on your experiences. You have experienced a 121 job so you have learned that it takes a lot more than 300 hrs to be safe and competent first officer. All those who had less than 1500hrs and were scooped up in the hiring wave have learned that they were not fit for that position and are now preaching for this new rule. As people grow they mature and it will be sobering when they look back to this date and realized how little they knew.

You can't really blame a young commercial pilot who accepts a job flying a jetliner with low time. It was his/her goal from the very beginning and it's unlikely they will pass it up even if they know they're not ready!
 
Re: NAFI apposed to 1500 hour rule

Honestly? I think the low time madness will be out of everybody's system soon enough, as once the people that were under the impression that getting hired at 250 hours was normal was up and into the system, people's expectations will go back to what they used to be.

Take me for example, and this just goes to show you how quickly things can change. I started my flight training in 1998 when I was 16 years old. At the time, I had no idea what it took to get yourself into an airliner cockpit, I was too busy trying to not kill myself in a Cessna 152.

I got to Western Michigan to study aviation in the fall of 2001. We all know what happened about three weeks into my college career. Our university was packed with out of work pilots that had been hired by, and then quickly furloughed by Mesaba. The days of riding on easy street were over as far as I was concerned.

Through my four and a half years of school, I spent a lot of time on here. I was receptive to what I was told because honestly, I didn't have anything else to gauge it against. I accepted that you needed to have somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 hours of flight time in order to get hired at a regional, it's just the way it was.

Heck even when I was looking for flight instructor jobs, the majority of places that I interviewed with (I think no less than 15 in the upper midwest/Michigan/Chicago area) told me up front at the start of the interview, "If you didn't graduate from Embry Riddle or UND, we're not really interested." Eventually, though a very strange sequence of events, I end up in Texas working at the flight school I did some training at. This was January of 2006.

Fast forward 6 months. I interviewed with Colgan after a very good friend of mine put in a good word for me. The start of the HR interview? "Kid, we're just gonna tell you, and this is true for the whole group of you today; if you don't have 1,500 hours, we're very likely not going to hire you today. It's nothing personal, but we need guys that can upgrade in under a year. At 600 hours, you're likely not what we're looking for, so if things don't work out today, and they most likely won't, come back in 6 months." This was June of 2006.

They didn't work out.

Then, I got hired at the freight company and moved to LA. The day I passed my checkrides there? ExpressJet and Comair both e-mail me. Airlines start cold calling people through e-mail to come to class and that they were hiring with 250 hours.

In under 6 months, the industry had gone from not being able to buy a flight instructing job in my area to having airlines begging me to come interview.

A year later I went to ExpressJet.

A year after that I was furloughed.

I was BLOWN AWAY that things went from so bad, to so good, and back to so bad so quickly.

Eventually our memories of the 2007 hiring boom will fade and we'll get adjusted back to the traditional reality that you need somewhere around 1,500 hours to fly jet airplanes around.

Until then, people will think, "But my flight instructor did it, why can't I!?"

Just not the way it works.

If that all makes sense, that is.
 
Re: NAFI apposed to 1500 hour rule

jtrain609 said:
Well, I mean it IS a Beech 1900, the grown up version of the King Air, which is one of the easiest and best flying aircraft on the face of the planet. Really, it's a fantastic airplane, and it hand flies like a dream. You want a real airplane? Get yourself a Chieftain, get yourself an MU-2, get yourself a Metro, get yourself strapped onto a Lear 35. But get yourself ANYTHING besides a 1900, which is really just a big King Air, which is really just a big Baron, which is really just a Bonanza with two engines :)
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How much 1900 time do you have? How much 1900 PIC do you have? How much time as a PIC in a 135 or 121 operation do you have? None, oh that's right. Look, you're right, the 1900 is an easy airplane to fly, especially with a two pilot crew, that said, its still a big airplane that takes a type. Try flying one of the things with the 1000lbs gross weight increase, still easy, but your performance is definitely reduced. The relative "difficulty" of the mechanical act of driving the airplane around has little if anything to do with how much you learn from the flying, and how challenging the flying is. Case in point, I found the 207 to be way harder than the 1900C to fly in terms of control pressures, and performance. And the cherokee to be way easier to fly than the 207. That said, my 207 job was relatively easy, and my cherokee job offers more of a challenge because of the variability of the conditions. "Easyness" to fly, means next to nothing.
 
Re: NAFI apposed to 1500 hour rule

ppragman said:
How much 1900 time do you have? How much 1900 PIC do you have? How much time as a PIC in a 135 or 121 operation do you have? None, oh that's right. Look, you're right, the 1900 is an easy airplane to fly, especially with a two pilot crew, that said, its still a big airplane that takes a type. Try flying one of the things with the 1000lbs gross weight increase, still easy, but your performance is definitely reduced. The relative "difficulty" of the mechanical act of driving the airplane around has little if anything to do with how much you learn from the flying, and how challenging the flying is. Case in point, I found the 207 to be way harder than the 1900C to fly in terms of control pressures, and performance. And the cherokee to be way easier to fly than the 207. That said, my 207 job was relatively easy, and my cherokee job offers more of a challenge because of the variability of the conditions. "Easyness" to fly, means next to nothing.
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:clap:
 
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