Sam Spade wrote:


The airlines will eventually, perhaps, use these advanced piston birds
to train their pilots from scratch, if necessary.

They've been doing that for a long time. Lufthansa uses Bonanza's in
Arizona, some of them have over 14,000 hours on them. When I was at GFK
in the early 90's UND had a program where airlines would send over zero
time students and they would leave UND in less thyan a year as first
officers on Airbuses and 747's. We had students from Gulf Air, China
Airlines and a third one that I can't recall right now. They started
their private pilot training in Piper Arrows and then moved into
Seminoles, King Airs and then finally Citations and Beechjets.