Sully and the 1500h rule

99driver said:
I think Sully is a tool bag who says whatever will get him the most attention. He panders to the uninformed, and spreads hysteria about the regional industry.
He is right about some things (like that we are underpaid), but he paints a picture to the media of a bunch of haphazard teenagers flying planes which are too big for our britches, having never seen a day of training in our lives.
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He reminds me of my dad, thinking that all airliners should be flown by former military pilots with a donkey-load of hours.
 
Pilot Fighter said:
I wasn't suggesting any flight deck issues. I was just suggesting it could change union politics. It reminds me of working for UPS in college. The part-timers couldn't vote on the contract as they would vote themselves a raise at the expense of the drivers.
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Many of us outside the regionals are fully typed FOs. Not an issue.
 
Are we reading the same blog? The most "offensive" thing I could find in his latest post was

Sully The Great said:
One provision of the law, the “Pilot Certification and Qualification Requirements” will raise the entry level qualifications for First Officers at regional airlines from the current absurdly low level of 250 hours to the better, but still minimal level of 1500 hours of flight time. The final rulemaking by the FAA to adopt, amend, or reject the provision is due on August 1st. The fact is, when new pilots get into the right seat of a regional jet, they are still getting on-the-job training with you as a passenger in the back. When new-hire regional pilots have a only few hundred hours in the cockpit they have not yet experienced many cycles of the seasons of the year, the thunderstorms in the summer, the ice and snow in the winter; they have not yet experienced the real world of operational flying, with all its vagaries and ambiguities, and much greater challenges than in the structured and sterile training environment.
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So his contentions, as far as I can tell:

1) 250 hours is an absurdly low level of experience to be sitting in the right seat of a jet.

Uhm, seems right to me.

2) 1500 hours is a "minimal" level of experience to be sitting in the right seat of a jet.

Seems wrong to me. Seems to me that 1500 hours is a pretty reasonable number

3) With a few hundred hours, you don't know diddly-squat about weather flying

Seems emminently, ludicrously true.

4) The "structured and sterile" training environment cannot teach you everything you need to know about flying a jet with a bunch of poor schlubs in the back, and therefore, people who have only ever beem trained to fly are, in fact, undergoing on the job training when they serve as a required crewmember on a passenger carrying aircraft.

Also seems true.

I don't see anything in there about "everyone ought to have 10,000 hours and a shuttle mission" or "only military pilots have The Right Stuff". Is there another post somewhere that I missed?
 
99driver said:
I think Sully is a tool bag who says whatever will get him the most attention. He panders to the uninformed, and spreads hysteria about the regional industry.
He is right about some things (like that we are underpaid), but he paints a picture to the media of a bunch of haphazard teenagers flying planes which are too big for our britches, having never seen a day of training in our lives.
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As others have said, maybe he has some agenda or whatever. But frankly I dont get why some people get all worked up about what he says about the regionals. For me, my regional was my first turbine and jet job, and I was one of the ones with higher time in the class (!). Facts are that regionals were (note past tense) entry level jobs, whether flying a Navajo in the 90s or a CRJ-700. And its not just pilots. Dispatchers and other support people too often get their first shot at a regional.
The flying public could care less about Regional pay...All they care about is getting from A to B as safely and cheaply as possible. When the public sees some kind of potential threat to their safety, then they react.
FYI Im a regional guy =).
 
Boris Badenov said:
Is there another post somewhere that I missed?
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No, you didn't miss a post but there was a context to his statements. He said those things in support of the ATP rule change. Yeah, 250 hours is insufficient, so is an ATP the best or only solution? And aren't we really talking about first officers?

Let's talk majors and let's talk jets. What's the minimum, in practice? Or, are we really concerned about the regionals? Fair enough. There seem to be quite a few pilots on this forum that can't seem to get on with the regionals with 250 hours. What regional is giving FO seats to minty fresh commerial pilots? So, who was Sully talking about?
 
I dunno, I'm confused. You say he's being ridiculous in one breath, then you say that no one gets on with less than 1500, anyway, in the next. Like, if a 1500 rule wouldn't hurt anyone, and is a reasonable bar to entry to blasting around the troposphere with 50, 70, or 90 trusting sheeple in the back, why not have the rule? *puzzle*

I never flew with an F/O who had less than about a grand of flight time, but in my extremely limited and no doubt statistically insignificant experience, the guys who had gazillions of hours herding a 208 or something similar around in thundersnow were a hell of a lot more useful than the guys who could tell me how wide the LOC signal was at 7.3 miles. *shrug*
 
Uh, no. I never said that. There are numbers between 250 and 1500, as airlines have always known. In support of the new rule Sully is bitching about regionals being flown by pilots with 250 hours. Is that an accurate portrayal?

Don't get me wrong, I would love to see all kinds of increases in hour requirements. I just don't think this new rule does as much to improve safety as is claimed.
 
99driver said:
I think Sully is a tool bag who says whatever will get him the most attention. He panders to the uninformed, and spreads hysteria about the regional industry.
He is right about some things (like that we are underpaid), but he paints a picture to the media of a bunch of haphazard teenagers flying planes which are too big for our britches, having never seen a day of training in our lives.
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So you know him personally..........enough to be certain that he is a tool bag? I've never seen or read of him pandering to anyone. Why would/should he? He certainly does not need the attention. Seems that he has a pretty decent and full life. Where have you seen him "paints(ing) a picture to the media of a bunch of haphazard teenagers flying planes which are too big for our britches, having never seen a day of training in our lives." Care to reference an article or an interview or in his testimony to Congress where he states anything remotely akin to this?
 
rframe said:
We should throw Sully and Yeager into a pit and place bets on who will come out alive.
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Put my Dollar Bill$ on Yeager! Sully sounds like a punk.

Rumor has it.... a famous drink was named after him! Yeager Bomb! Yeager Myster! lol... It was one hell of a drink :smoke:!

Don't mess with Yeager's!

#Jager
 
What sort of proof would you like? I mean, there's the rub, isn't it? Accidents are so vanishingly rare that we're forced to speak about the "quality" of pilots through anecdotal accounts. My anecdotal experience suggests to me that pilots who have dealt with real-world, serious, it's-your-ass-in-the-seat decisions are wildly superior to pilots who have had some canned "emergencies" they've already read the cheat-sheet for thrown at them in an air-conditioned simulator. IMHO, you simply cannot simulate the cold lump in your tum-tum when you're in an airplane and something is going Seriously Wrong. And that sort of experience comes with, eh, experience.

I dunno, maybe there's someone out there with a lot of apocryphal stories about how they had some billion hour freighthound freeze up in a tight spot, but the 22 year old, 300 hour pup from State Aviation Academy saved them from certain destruction thanks to their 400-level Human Factors class. I make no claims to Statistical Authenticity. But I will be waiting to hear those stories with bated breath.
 
Boris Badenov said:
I dunno, I'm confused. You say he's being ridiculous in one breath, then you say that no one gets on with less than 1500, anyway, in the next. Like, if a 1500 rule wouldn't hurt anyone, and is a reasonable bar to entry to blasting around the troposphere with 50, 70, or 90 trusting sheeple in the back, why not have the rule? *puzzle*

I never flew with an F/O who had less than about a grand of flight time, but in my extremely limited and no doubt statistically insignificant experience, the guys who had gazillions of hours herding a 208 or something similar around in thundersnow were a hell of a lot more useful than the guys who could tell me how wide the LOC signal was at 7.3 miles. *shrug*
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I LOVE thundersnow!
 
Great discussion, great points of view, thanks!

Well, I've stated that I agree with what he said about the 1500h rule, as in the general rule you should be able to find more capable pilots in that new 1500h pool than out of a 250h fast lane school.

But he did quite had a hard speech against regional pilots implying to the general public that they'd be unsafe in a regional flight due to the lowish experience (as if you would find a 900-250 crew).
Is the main safety issue inexperience or actually fatigue and low QOL?
 
I'd suggest we make the ATP require 1500 PIC not TT. Aside from being required for a 121 FO now, I'd argue that 250 PIC is no where near enough experience for what an ATP entitles you to do.

<ducks>
 
Boris Badenov said:
If you kept on JC like you should, young man, you'd know that Chucky is widely regarded as a raging jerk. And only a raging jerk would ask YOU (who know nothing about anything due to your youth, inexperience, and puzzling history of pulling quality tail) anything more than the time of day! If that! Harumph!
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Duh. It happens all the time!
 
Boris Badenov said:
What sort of proof would you like? I mean, there's the rub, isn't it? Accidents are so vanishingly rare that we're forced to speak about the "quality" of pilots through anecdotal accounts. My anecdotal experience suggests to me that pilots who have dealt with real-world, serious, it's-your-ass-in-the-seat decisions are wildly superior to pilots who have had some canned "emergencies" they've already read the cheat-sheet for thrown at them in an air-conditioned simulator. IMHO, you simply cannot simulate the cold lump in your tum-tum when you're in an airplane and something is going Seriously Wrong. And that sort of experience comes with, eh, experience.

I dunno, maybe there's someone out there with a lot of apocryphal stories about how they had some billion hour freighthound freeze up in a tight spot, but the 22 year old, 300 hour pup from State Aviation Academy saved them from certain destruction thanks to their 400-level Human Factors class. I make no claims to Statistical Authenticity. But I will be waiting to hear those stories with bated breath.
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Freight dogs rule, everyone else drools! :D
 
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