That puts things into a bit of perspective but let us clarify this a bit
more.

First of all, let us talk about high performance piston singles. No doubt
there are pilots with poor judgment there. But there is no way you can tell
me it is not possible for a businessman who takes piloting very seriously to
fly a Malibu or P210 or other high performance piston single 100 hours per
year to a professional and highly acceptable level. I reject the argument
that someone cannot do this well because he has other things on his mind --
if that were the case then we should ground airline pilots going through
divorce and we should also ground all airline pilots this year since they
all have huge financial stress. Along these lines, there is no NTSB or
other document that has ever suggested a 100-hour per year pilot who attends
recurrent training cannot safely fly a Malibu - no such document exists.

Yes, I am a light aircraft instructor. I also fly a high performance piston
single for personal trips. I fly over 400 hours per year. It so happens I
am also a physician. Yes, I believe I fly to professional standards. And
I know lots of my students who are entrepreneurs or partners in various
professional practices and fly 100-150 hours per year and whom I would
entrust to fly my children. And I know such pilots whom I would prefer not
to fly with. Each case is different -- let us not generalize.

As for the new light jets, I will say upfront that I do not have experience
with jets so I will to some extent defer to your judgment. It certainly is
intuitively understandable that the skills to fly at 400 knots are quite
different than those to fly at 200 knots. I do have lots of concern
regarding how a piston pilot will be able to step-up to such jets; perhaps
it will require an extensive mentoring process by which a new VLJ pilot
flies as copilot for a year or so after buying such a jet. Perhaps you can
suggest other training and proficiency standards. I suspect the "dropout"
rate for new VLJ pilots will be a lot higher than for new high performance
piston pilots. Set the bar as high as you want but I think it is quite
unfair to overgeneralize and say de facto that a 100 hour per year pilot
cannot be professional in flying a VLJ; set your criteria based on
performance, not by an unrealistically high minimum number of annual flight
hours and certainly not by some stereotype of who you think is qualified to
be a pilot.


--------------------
Richard Kaplan

www.flyimc.com