So about that 1500 hour rule...

zmiller4 said:
There was a basic lack of flying skills that contributed significantly to that incident that certainly may not have existed had the CA spent a little more time gaining experience prior to the airlines.

He had 625hrs total when he got hired at Colgan (and that includes a fair amount of right seat 1900 time at Gulfstream). I don’t think it’s silly to entertain the idea that an additional 900hrs of experience before moving to an automated environment would have made a difference.
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And the right seat FO? A CFI who had flown at high density altitudes with students trying to kill her.


I don't think it would have made a difference. This CA was deficient at literally every checkride in his life.
 
Fixtur said:
I suppose there's not enough data to show that the rule improved safety, if you don't count the fact that there hasn't been a single fatal accident involving pilot error since.

I absolutely disagree with the assessment that it was a "do nothing" law. It forced regionals to start paying professionals professional money and improved the QOL for all of us. Because of these changes, regional pilots are less likely to show up to work fatigued, stressed, hungry, and distracted, and that's pretty much the IMSAFE checklist.
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Meh, I think it falls under the correlation does not imply causation.


Just admit it - which sounds like you did, that pilots want the ATP and 1500 hr rule because of the pilot pay it demands with the self-created shortage.



I walked these shoes - you drop the ATP rule and let kids fly with a Comm-Inst-ME and 250 hrs into RJs and 737s/320s, there will be a line of people from LA to Nashville ready to be an airline pilot, and end whatever pilot shortage that existed today and tomorrow.
 
Cherokee_Cruiser said:
Meh, I think it falls under the correlation does not imply causation.


Just admit it - which sounds like you did, that pilots want the ATP and 1500 hr rule because of the pilot pay it demands with the self-created shortage.



I walked these shoes - you drop the ATP rule and let kids fly with a Comm-Inst-ME and 250 hrs into RJs and 737s/320s, there will be a line of people from LA to Nashville ready to be an airline pilot, and end whatever pilot shortage that existed today and tomorrow.
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ZapBrannigan said:
The only profession I can think of where the ACTUAL PROFESSIONALS argue AGAINST things that make one well qualified, experienced, and highly trained.

WHY would pilots WANT someone with less than 1500 hours flying an airliner?!
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This. Let's not forget that flying a clapped out Baron full of blood specimens or any other 135 IFR gig has required 1,200 hours since forever, and actual insurance requirements were far higher. 1,500, if not much higher, was the defacto regional/commuter requirement since they became a thing, and nobody squawked about that.

The ATP rule isn't about 1,500 hours, per se. Heck, getting the ATP before the rule wasn't really about 1,500 hours, it was about HOW you got from 0 to 1,500 hours.

Going from wet commercial to watching the autopilot fly and having the captain make the decision does zero to make a good pilot. It's just rote memorization. Then all of a sudden you're in the left seat, with no idea how to say "no". Even a CFI learns that lesson early on.

Its a consolidation process, it's a learning process, it's a "get to know thyself" process, and yes, for the industry, it's a couple years long vetting process. If you can run the gauntlet, you're probably pretty stable.

This isn't an either/or. It's not like a single person is safe at 1,501 whereas at 1,499 they weren't. But that's where the statistics show that you have a pretty good chance of not being a complete dip• where you have the potential to hurt someone, including yourself.

FWIW, every single pilot I've met that was opposed to the ATP rule had some vested interest in it being otherwise. Kid doesn't want to be a CFI or work himself up or has a financial interest in some school somewhere selling the dream. Very rarely is it some rando just spouting off.
 
Cherokee_Cruiser said:
And the right seat FO? A CFI who had flown at high density altitudes with students trying to kill her.


I don't think it would have made a difference. This CA was deficient at literally every checkride in his life.
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I dunno. I think the FO could have made a huge difference but she had been awake for over 24 hours. She also had very little experience. One of her last sentences captured by the FDR was “wow I’ve never seen this much ice before.”

Should that have been something the CA noticed? Yeah absolutely. Should the captain increased his speed flying a turbo prop that can basically stop without using wheel brakes. Yeah absolutely.

However, a good FO could have made a strong recommendation to do just that as well. I remember reading the FDR transcript and that part of the recording where the FO notes the airframe icing and it made me so upset. I had taken years of the Caravan icing seminar for insurance and tail stalls were covered intensely. At the time the transcript was released to the public I thought an FO with more experience could have made the difference.

I still do now.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Richman said:
FWIW, every single pilot I've met that was opposed to the ATP rule had some vested interest in it being otherwise. Kid doesn't want to be a CFI or work himself up or has a financial interest in some school somewhere selling the dream. Very rarely is it some rando just spouting off.
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Look at who’s opposed to it (or thinks it’s worthless) in this thread…small sample but it completely supports your hypothesis here.
 
Richman said:
But that's where the statistics show that you have a pretty good chance of not being a complete dip• where you have the potential to hurt someone, including yourself.
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I tend to agree, however there’s not an abundance of research on the matter.


Quoting myself from another thread, it wouldn’t take much to come up with something better than the current rule.

I’m betting that wet ATP’s have never been as weak as they are now.

Keep the 1500, but add multipliers. 2x for jet PIC, 1.5x for muti-engine turboprop PIC, 1.25x for multi-engine PIC. Something like this would reward quality PIC time and devalue weak SIC time.
 
Richman said:
Disagree. The insurance companies have decades of actuarial and loss data. They're no dummies.
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Backing up a bit. There was little if any research that determined that 1500 was the right number for ATP’s. Likewise, there was little if any research that determined that 121 operations would be safer with FO’s with ATP’s.

Everybody agreed that more experience would be safer but there was no research to support the ATP rule other that it sounded reasonable. It’s the five lock logic problem. You can justify five locks on your front door based on the logic that additional locks increase safety. If you go from one lock to five locks after a break-in and never have a break-in after five locks, you certainly have the data to support the five-lock solution.

If insurance industry talent was in the air safety business, they certainly could put together some excellent research.

They are no dummies but they rarely care about airline safety, they aren’t in the airline safety business. The data they collect probably doesn’t include much about crew training and experience. Why should it?

If the actuaries predicted one 777 loss per decade and the execs based premiums on three 777 losses per decade, the stockholders would be pleased as punch if there were three or less 777 losses per decade. Everything else is pretty trivial.

Folks draw too many conclusions from aircraft insurance outside 121.

If an insurance company insured 500 Bonanza’s they might place an hour requirement on the type. While this might improve safety and decrease losses, that’s not their motivation. They can insure a pool at any loss level. The issue is whether raising premiums is good for business. Raising premiums might result in a decrease in revenue as customers switch insurance companies or sell their planes.

So, losses alone don’t trigger insurance company concern for safety.
 
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Pilot Fighter said:
My biggest problem with the 1500 Hour Rule is that it wouldn’t have taken much more effort to come up with a better rule, a rule that rewarded and encouraged what we used to call quality time.
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The problem is that the "quality" in "quality time" is precisely its qualitative nature. The only adequate judge of quality in a human/artful endeavor is a person of even greater quality in that endeavor - according to some cultural/experiential/intuitive measure. Qualitative doesn't work for stupid/inexperienced/uninformed people or organizations. It works even less well for A/I, or expense-reducing businesses. All of those entities are generally literally incapable of assessing quality. Bereft of any judgement, those bureaucratic/digital/cheap entities are left with the vacuous LCD of Quantitative - a sum that can be measured using short-term "efficiency" metrics summed by some automated tabulation mechanism.

Congress doesn't make laws based on truth and science and excellence. Congress doesn't make laws based on virtue. Congress makes laws based on votes. Worse yet, Congress makes laws based on them what pays 'em - typically those bereft, current expense-reducing billionaires who own those bereft, current expense-reducing businesses.
 
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Wardogg said:
And how many did Conrad Aska have when he got hired? At any of his 7 different airlines. All post 2011.

Sometimes people aren't supposed to be pilots. No matter how many hours they have. And its hard for us to say that because we all want people to succeed in this business and experience what we get to experience.

I'm in favor of the law but I find it hard to correlate its affect on airline safety. When we look at the corporate side most of our accidents have very experienced crews on board. Yes, more experience makes one a better/safer pilot. I'm only saying that the law as and when it was written was a feel good, do nothing law. We're the only ones with it. And yet airlines around the world aren't crashing airplanes every month.
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That’s because corporate flying is an absolute safety cesspool. It doesn’t hold a candle to 121. Period.

I’m 100% for any regulation that requires a large amount of experience prior to flying a large amount of paying customers. It’s also saving us from ourselves in a way. Requiring 1500 hours to exercise ATP privileges prevents wide eyed dip-sticks with shiny jet syndrome from lowering the bar for ALL of us.

You ought to know this.
 
Apophis said:
That’s because corporate flying is an absolute safety cesspool. It doesn’t hold a candle to 121. Period.

I’m 100% for any regulation that requires a large amount of experience prior to flying a large amount of paying customers. It’s also saving us from ourselves in a way. Requiring 1500 hours to exercise ATP privileges prevents wide eyed dip-sticks with shiny jet syndrome from lowering the bar for ALL of us.

You ought to know this.
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Pretty sure that's NOT what he was indicating or implying... But I could be wrong. Increasingly, I need to exercise greater caution in my assumptions about reality, 'cause, you know, when enough people say two plus two equals five, one had darned-well start getting real bad at math.
 
Ben Baldanza was on the Airlines Confidential podcast again today promoting 250 hour FOs. His entire reasoning is that they’ll be flying with Captains who have more than 1500TT in a master and apprentice type of operation.

This guy was CEO of Spirit and worked for a half dozen other airlines and he still doesn’t realize that in the USA, a first officer isn’t an apprenticeship. It’s a partnership. And for it to BE a partnership, we need well qualified, highly trained, and EXPERIENCED, first officers. Not seat warmers.
 
Wasn’t Baldanza at the helm of Spirit when the pilots struck? That should about sum up his opinions of airline labor and mine of him.
 
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