A recent Buffalo News article discusses how the airlines are lobbying to rescind a new provision requiring commercial pilots to obtain 1,500 hours of flight time before they are certified (a Congressional response to last year’s fatal crash in Buffalo). The companies believe that this will cause pilots’ wages to rise (to pay for the increased training costs the pilots must incur), causing average total costs to increase, increasing industry prices and reducing output and profits.
But there are winners: flight schools would see an increase in demand (as pilot trainees stay enrolled longer); and, most important, the consumer who values safety a lot would be safer, at the cost of higher-priced air tickets. No doubt the airlines would welcome a return to the good old days, when almost all pilots were former military men whose training costs were paid by taxpayers, which represented a huge indirect subsidy to the airlines.
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Comment #3 in my previous post should read: 1,500 hours is roughly 3x the number of hours it takes for a competitive first officer candidate to get hired now
Jim C – Exactly right. It is that fact which concerns the airlines – a smaller supply of pilots may increase the cost.
Bill (#4), you may see diminishing returns to safety, but the safety required by airline passengers is very high because of the consequences of an accident. Flying safety is responsive to total experience and recency of experience, so it’s not unreasonable to think that total time is a good proxy (or at least part of the calculation) for flying safety.
If the above comments about the bill requiring 1500 hours of “flight time” are correct, then the politicians should foot the bill because this is a piece of legislation designed to fool travellers into thinking they are safer when they probably aren’t. (Just like most post 9/11 security changes….)
These days Formula 1 racing drivers get almost no on-circuit testing and practice, due to the rule changes designed to limit team budgets. Instead they practice, and even learn new circuits, using simulators. If modern simulation technology is good enough to prepare people for such a demanding task, then it’s certainly good enough to train commercial pilots. So the bill is a waste of money. QED.
Ultimately, in a supply & demand equilibirum, whoever is hiring the pilot will end up bearing most of the cost of their training and experience. Either directly as in the military (we’re hiring them to fly, and paying for their training) or indirectly in commercial airlines (we’re paying for tickets that pay salary, that’s high enough to make up for the time & cost of training and working lower paying jobs getting experience).
Is the additional cost of requiring more flight experience worth the additional cost of higher airline tickets? Who knows, but we’re going to pay the cost and get the benefits.
And I wouldn’t say that tax payer trained pilots is a subsidy to the airline industry. I believe there’s enough competition to keep profit low. Instead I would say it’s a subsidy from the tax paying public to the ticket buying passangers. If you fly alot you’re probably saving a few bucks, and if you never fly you’re probably paying a few bucks extra.
If 1500 hours is required, then it doesn’t matter if it’s “training” or “experience”. The point is, only a small percentage of persons will be able to afford to stay in flight schools/buy aircraft time to build those hours. In the end, the article is correct; only those people who are rich enough to purchase flight time (over $100/hour) or subsidized by the government (Civil Air Patrol by some states, the Armed Forces by US Gov) will be fully qualified.
Pilots get experience in a variety of ways. Some work as co-pilots or engineers and get flying time only when the plane is being transferred empty. A similar method is used to train ship captains. This means they have a lot more hours as observers than as practitioners, and the training experience is much more than 1500 hours.
Flight simulators are also used, but they are very expensive. Would you actually get on a plane that the pilot had only flown on a simulator?
We will not have fully robotic airplanes until FAA rules allow it. No robotic planes are flown in US Airspace withithout special FAA permission, which means the airspace is closed to other traffic. those rules may change as part of the NEXTGEN airtraffic control system.
Automatic control will most likely happen as a counterterrorist or safety measure: if someone storms the cockpit or the crew is incapacitated, just shut the cockpit down and fly from a box in the belly, either remotely or automatically.
The bulk of pilot errors occur when they have accumulated enough flight time to feel cocky, but not enough to get the crap scared out a few times. Experienced pilots get over that accident hump. In general aviation, that means around 400 hours, I think. That’s about what Kennedy had.
“Train pilots”?
I thought trains used engineers!