Private Planes: Freedom, Security, and Responsibility

Robert M. Gary wrote:

Apparently the airlines would like the get their pilots from pools of
applicants w/o any jet time. Charter is the only way for most to get
initial jet time. Even military pilot usually spend time with charter
outfits before going to the airlines.

To the extent some ex-military pilots do spend time with "charter"
outfits, I think it is more a matter of biding their time until a major
airline is in a hiring mode than it is that "charters" are a route to
the eventual left seat at American, United, Delta, or Northwest. The
airline industry is so cyclical, and hiring decisions so surprisingly ad
hoc in some instances, that the validity of sweeping statements about
what the "airlines would like" may have a very short half-life.

When the pool of available applicants is wide and deep you may see a
certain pattern of hiring, as some have claimed was discernible at DAL,
or at UAL. When the pool is shallower and/or the time horizon is short,
availability sometimes comes down to nothing more complex than which
dozen applicants out of a pool of several hundred suitable candidates
can show up Monday morning ready to enter the program, with 72 hours',
or less, notice. Ideally that wouldn't happen, but the weather isn't the
only thing that changes minute by minute in the airline business.

There is no advantage in hiring from a pool of applicants whose
experience doesn't translate well to the new job description. Jet time
is good, turboprop time is OK, piston-time-only must be rare these days
among major airline pilot job applicants and, I'd bet, rarer still among
successful applicants. I believe the modern military turns out a product
better oriented to the standards of the Big Four, and their
hard-charging younger rivals, than do some of what you call "charter"
outfits, into which group get lumped some very unusual cats and dogs.

Long ago, in 1973, in my initial training class at what was then called
a "regional" airline, out of eight starters there were six who completed
training. The two who fell by the wayside each had a combination of at
least two of the following deficiencies: no turbine time; little
multi-engine time; very little IFR time/proficiency; a wife who was
causing trouble for her own reasons; and, no large aircraft time -- and
both were civilians. Out of the six successful hires, four were former
military (three, fighter) pilots, and the two remaining civilians had
multi-turbine time, IIRC. The moral of this story to me: that was a
qualification, interview, and review process that was in today's terms
substandard, but then represented the best that Co. could do under the
necessity to put enough warm bodies into the right seat on short notice.

It's good to have a mix of backgrounds in your pilot group, if only in
order to have a problem-solver for every type of problem, and it's
better yet to have a large pool of qualified applicants, do your
homework, choose the winners on the basis of proven success in areas
requiring the kind of abilities and expertise your crews actually use
every day, AND give them enough advance notice that the cream of the
crop can put everything else on hold and "be there."

These days, nobody's going anywhere, to speak of.


Jack