Lurch wrote:
SR-CPL, same requirements as ATPL but another 25 instrument, this will stop most instructors from achieving the license with only instructing experience
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500 Co-pilot
Same old story, somebody with the 'I have arrived, now lets lock the doors' attitude.
Why the special emphasis on trying to lock the instructors out of the upgrade path ? Why the _requirement_ for 500 hours of co-pilot on the ATPL ? Consider this, one of the privileges of the ATPL is that you can be the chief pilot, which makes you responsible for the training program. I would suggest that since chief pilot privileges are attached to the ATPL, and with that comes a training responsibility, by your logic, then 500 hours of instructing should be a requirement for the ATPL. Rather than trying to exclude instructors from your upgrade path, your logic actually suggests that instructing experience should be required, because training responsibilities are indeed one of the privileges that come with the ATPL and it's associated chief pilot possibilities.
Then on the co-pilot time, well that's just stupid. I'm sure I am not the only one out there that has never held a 'co-pilot' position. I've got single pilot IFR time that counts up in the thousands, and I've got two crew time also counting up in the thousands. Would you exclude me from your new ATPL simply because I have spent all my two crew time in the command position, and never held the second position ? The irony, the only times I've ever been dispatched as a 'co-pilot', was as the 'supervisor' in an 'under supervision' scenario. I could understand a requirement for a minimum amount of multi crew time, but, if that is part of the requirements, any seat in a multi-crew cockpit should be fine. Some airplanes even have more than two seats for flight crew. Third crew position can come in the form of a back seat working engines, it can also come in the form of a 'cruiser'. There are indeed many different ways to gain experience in an sop driven multi-crew cockpit, and they dont all involve sitting right seat in a beech 1900.
And since you are so hell bent on filtering, lets go back to 6 or 8 exams for the license, like it was in the good old days when I got mine. Exclude the calculators while we are at it, you get two hours to write the nav test, using a wiz-wheel, with a pass mark substantially higher than what it is today. Make sure there is absolutely no way somebody can take a weekend crash course that spews forth 100 multiple choice answers and then pass the written exam on monday. Lets go back to the good old days, the nav test alone is 100 questions, and you need to be proficient with the wiz wheel to get the correct answers. Then the met exam, another 100 questions which you cannot pass if you cannot decode AND UNDERSTAND an entire wx brief for an area which you are not familiar, and figure out from that just how many hours in the future you can expect a wind shift at a given airport, and to what direction / speed it's going to shift. Hehe another irony, going back to the concept of 6 exams that are actually hard enough to require subject knowledge, you'll tip the scales back to those lowly instructors you seem to so despise. Teach met a few times in the cpl and/or instrument groundschools, and all of a sudden, those exams become trivially easy, no studying required. There is no way to more thoroughly understand a subject, than to teach it for a while.
Your idea of 'appropriate' requirements is nothing more than a thinly veiled excuse to say 'make what I have the minimum, then the job market wont be so tough anymore', then try wrap it up in a 'good for the public' and 'it will be safer' gift wrap. But your gift wrap doesn't pass the sniff test of somebody looking at the big picture, and not the pigeon hole single advancement path you chose to take. There are many different advancement paths in the business, and each one presents it's own set of strengths and weaknesses. And not all of those advancement paths lead to a union job driving the bus on scheduled service, which appears to be the only destination your requirements seem to consider.
But if I think about it objectively, I like these requirements.
