Possible New FAA Commuter Rule from Buffalo Crash

Regionals are having a hard time finding qualified pilots (or they were before the recession), so let's see-- let's make the job even less desirable! That's the answer.

 

This is hard to fathom. I know too many furloughed pilots who cannot find work. My son is one of them. Last I heard there were 20,000 pilots floating around trying to find flying jobs. Regarding the reported rule changes, it's about time. What the regionals do to their crews is criminal.

 

It is doubly criminal when they exclude people who can actually FLY and yet keep these airplane drivers that cannot.

Hate to speak ill, but I don't think that crew could have made that approach in ice even if they had slept for two days.

 

I have to agree and don't want to point fingers but you are right- on regarding the current situation. I am friends with some very sharp professional pilots who are now ground pounders and I keep hearing about the new breed of, as you said, "drivers". Lord knows all of us try to do our best but if the attitude, training, and experience aren't there, there will be problems. I feel bad for that crew because they did the best that they knew but it wasn't good enough in a deteriorating situation. I can't count the times when I wanted to poke my instructors in the mouth for screaming at me to wake up and take control of the airplane or to think ahead of where we were or the many other head knocking exercises. I have been thankful for it many times. I'm not an ace by any stretch of the imagination ( my wife keeps telling me that I spell " ace" wrong) but I have never taken flying as a casual game.

 

The airlines and pilot's unions are completely at fault for creating an environment of entitlements. They generally don't pay you more if you are a better pilot than the next guy; seniority is calculated by your amount of time with the company. As long as you meet the minimum flying standards, they don't care how good you are.

To make matters worse, the whole career is a complete crap-shoot. If you go to work for an airline that goes belly-up, you must start over from the bottom of the seniority list at the next one.

The idea that you have to "serve your time" in the commuters in order to work your way up to the bigger equipment and higher pay is worse than working for the government. The greatest trouble is that the standards of airmanship have steadily fallen. Automation is at least partially at fault, but there is also this mentality of "procedures" over "common sense" permeating the industry. When you tell a pilot exactly what to do for long enough, he learns to depend on the extra instruction and loses some of his ability to think for himself.

A 30,000 hour airline pilot in a Bonanza can be one of the most dangerous dudes around! I've flown with a former commuter pilot (now working at Simuflight) who was convinced that an HSI had reverse sensing while on the localizer outbound. She thought that because that was what she was taught at an airline, and had been dutifully plugging in the outbound course ever since!

Even in a Hawker-- I'd rather sit with a 23 year old rookie pilot with 500 recent hours hauling freight in the mountains for some cheezy 135 outfit (preferably in a Cessna 4XX with no autopilot) than nearly any Airline guy with 2,000 hours flying a commutter.

People bad-mouth corporate aviation for crazy schedules and demanding employers, but a reasonably skilled pilot with the ability to sell himself will make at least three times as much money as he will in the airlines. Meanwhile, the airlines are sucking the passion of flight right out of a generation of pilots who don't know better than to work for them. Shame!