Should Airlines Hire Pilots with Minimum Flying Time?

 

                                  Should Airlines Hire Pilots with Minimum Flying Time?

                                                                          by

                                                                 Eric Paul Nolte

 

There is a pilot shortage in the airline industry today. Southwest Airlines is said to start hiring pilots who meet merely the FAA’s minimum required hours in the air. 

How much experience does it take to make a good pilot?  Much less a good airline pilot?

The military takes recruits with no flying experience at all and trains them for a year of extraordinary intensity to win their wings.  At that point, they have about 200 hours total flying time.  Then they send them out to get qualified on the equipment they will fly at their ultimate military units.  Maybe another couple or few hundred hours or so.  Now they may indeed fly single seat fighters, but on all the other equipment they will not be aircraft commanders, they will fly as co-pilots for a long time.

In the civilian world, you can get a commercial pilot certificate with 200 hours as a pilot, but nobody will hire you with that kind of experience except when you get an instructor's certificate, where you will be allowed to teach private pilot students to fly mostly the simplest and least sophisticated airplanes, and strictly in good weather.  

(Incidentally, do you wonder how bizarre is this?  That the pundits and mentors of future pilots should be the least experienced pilots in the community?  But it makes sense when one realizes that pilot pay, like that of every other worker, is predicated essentially on the revenue that can be generated for the company by the capital equipment at the disposal of the worker.  The worker with a pick and shovel cannot possibly generate the productivity of the same worker operating a big backhoe.  Airplane trainers are the smallest and least profitable equipment in the inventory.  Whereas, a great big old Boeing or Airbus, seating up to from 300 to 800 passengers, each paying thousands of dollars, flying from, say, New York to Hong Kong, will generate a big pile of money.  Pilot pay is invariably a fraction of the revenue generated by their equipment.)

To be a charter pilot requires 1200 hours.  An ATP (airline transport pilot) must take a special ground school class and then have a minimum of 1500 hours total time just to be allowed to take the written exam.  After my retirement from the airlines, that's the class I used to teach at Flight Safety International’s Tucson campus.  Then the applicant must pass a stringent oral exam and a flight test before winning this ATP certificate. 

In the old days, no airline would hire a pilot with so little experience.  When I hired on at People Express Airlines in 1983, I had over 4000 hours, and half of that experience was flying Martin 404s and DC-3s.  The Martin was a 1950's twin-engine airliner with hydraulically boosted flight controls, a pressurized cabin that allowed it to fly up to an altitude of 20,000 feet, and other advanced features.  The DC-3 was a twin-engine World War II transport airplane (renamed the C-47 by the Army.)  It was a cantankerous and challenging old bird with piston engines and a bad habit of suffering frequent broken parts, including, in my case, nine in-flight engine failures (well, four of these were on the Martin.)

Even so, like all the other airlines, one is not hired as a captain.  I was a co-pilot for another ten years of flying before I was given the chance to train to become a captain.

To the point here, airline flying is an unending series of training, retraining, testing, and re-testing for every different airplane you fly and then at every six months there is recurrent training in the classroom and in the flight simulator.  Hours and hours every year.

So should we be alarmed that Southwest is reducing its hiring requirements to accept pilots who meet merely the FAA's minimum standards?

The mischief is in the details, and I don't know all the details, but I would assure anybody that Southwest will not soon be putting minimally qualified pilots in the Captain's seat of any of their airplanes.  These newly hired pilots will no doubt fly for many more years under the tutelage of experienced Captains before being given the opportunity to upgrade to Captain. 

It doesn't sound outright dangerous to me.

 

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