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> Prior to 2010, pilots needed just 250 hours to start flying for a commercial airline. The Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of

> Prior to 2010, pilots needed just 250 hours to start flying for a commercial airline. The Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010 raised this requirement from 250 hours to 1,500 hours. >co-pilots in foreign countries are required to have just 240 hours, with some of those hours occurring in a simulator. This is from a different article but feel like this is lower hanging fruit than getting rid of two co-pilots completely. don't know if the "pilot shortage" is still happening that resulted from lots retiring/taking buyouts at the beginning of covid but it is quite a lot of hours to train for a role that doesnt pay too much. https://injuryaccidentnews.jcreiterlaw.com/2019/10/09/do-international-pilots-need-fewer-flight-training-hours-to-qualify/ https://injuryaccidentnews.jcreiterlaw.com/2019/10/09/do-int...

lotsofpulp 4y ago
>This is from a different article but feel like this is lower hanging fruit than getting rid of two co-pilots completely. The other low hanging fruit is to not underpay new pilots in exchange for them hitting the lottery and the career only paying off if they are lucky enough to land a cushy gig at a big airline.
akiselev 4y ago
The pilot shortage is all up and down the stack, including in GA [1], commercial, and military. There simply isn’t enough pilots anywhere in the pipeline. It doesn’t help that most PPLs tend towards wealthy professionals who sure as hell aren’t sitting in an aluminum tube nonstop six to twenty hours at a time. Instead of using pilots’ love of flying to siphon off recruits from other professions theyve used it to keep salaries down just like the gaming industry. You reap what you sow. It’s going to take a generation of higher salaries to build that pipeline back out. Instead they just want to drop a pilot. F that. [1] private pilots make up part of our natural disaster infrastructure and the FAA has long been trying to get more people into aviation because that’s going to be a painful shortage if i.e. the big one hits the Seattle area and most of rhe highways get eaten by sand
- noahtallen 4y ago
  The sad thing about GA is that it’s just so cost prohibitive. You’re talking tens of thousands of dollars just to get the basic license, and even then it’s not that practically useful (you can’t even fly at night or in weather without an instrument rating). I would love to get my PP, but even in a well-paying field it’s just inaccessible without dedicating a lot more than I’m ready to give.
  - akiselev 4y ago
    The GA manufacturing industry seems to have entered death spiral. With the fall in popularity of GA, the number of planes made every year went way down which drove the price of both new and used planes up. We went from producing almost 20,000 GA planes a year in the 1970s to under a thousand a year in the 1990s and it's barely recovered since then (1,500 a year IIRC)
    - IAmNotACellist 4y ago
      Let me guess, the nadir happened in 1971?
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    You can get the JAR-PPL SEP license for 10k exactly here in Europe (Spain -prepaid course) and everyone tells me that the US is cheaper. It's expensive yes but not out of reach of most people. Once you start looking into CPL, night rating, multiple engine etc that's when it gets expensive.
  - bobsomers 4y ago
    > you can’t even fly at night or in weather without an instrument rating Minor nit: You can fly at night with a Private Pilot's certificate, but it must be under VFR like all your daytime flying.
    - blueslurpee 4y ago
      This differs in Europe, where some NAA's view night flying as equivalent to IFR.
willnonya 4y ago
This is the source of the current shortage. It is much more time consuming and expensive just to become a commercial pilot now. This has completely disrupted the progression and training in the pipeline and will not be alleviated by halving the pilot requirements. When this flight hour change runs head first into a large number of pilots retiring the entire industry is going to be in a state of emergency.
- bombcar 4y ago
  We solve that by going to war; the military is perfectly fine sticking a 19 year old with 20 hours of stick time behind the controls of a supply plane. And when the war is over we have a glut of pilots.
biomcgary 4y ago
Why not require a pilot with 1.5k of hours and allow co-pilots with 250+ hours for cargo and 500+ hours for passenger? It would decrease the upfront cost of getting trained as a pilot before getting paid.
- rdtwo 4y ago
  Most of the major airplane accidents in the last decade were caused by those low hour pilots
- josefx 4y ago
  Some accidents where caused by pilot and copilot providing conflicting input. Having two pilots pilots with significant training differences has the potential to make things worse.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Which accidents are those? Pilot training has long emphasized the importance of having only one pilot actively flying the aircraft at a time, while the other acts as a monitor.
    - josefx 4y ago
      2009 Air France 447. The copilot was panicking and never let go of the controls even after vocally handing them over. The pilot only seemed to realize this shortly before the crash. The wiki page for it mentions a lot of other issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 . Including an offhand remark by the pilot that he only had one hour of sleep and warnings that only sounded when the plane was in a remotely sane orientation.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    They need a manager in the cockpit.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

>This is from a different article but feel like this is lower hanging fruit than getting rid of two co-pilots completely. The other low hanging fruit is to not underpay new pilots in exchange for them hitting the lottery and the career only paying off if they are lucky enough to land a cushy gig at a big airline.

akiselev 4y ago

The pilot shortage is all up and down the stack, including in GA [1], commercial, and military. There simply isn’t enough pilots anywhere in the pipeline. It doesn’t help that most PPLs tend towards wealthy professionals who sure as hell aren’t sitting in an aluminum tube nonstop six to twenty hours at a time. Instead of using pilots’ love of flying to siphon off recruits from other professions theyve used it to keep salaries down just like the gaming industry. You reap what you sow. It’s going to take a generation of higher salaries to build that pipeline back out. Instead they just want to drop a pilot. F that. [1] private pilots make up part of our natural disaster infrastructure and the FAA has long been trying to get more people into aviation because that’s going to be a painful shortage if i.e. the big one hits the Seattle area and most of rhe highways get eaten by sand

noahtallen 4y ago
The sad thing about GA is that it’s just so cost prohibitive. You’re talking tens of thousands of dollars just to get the basic license, and even then it’s not that practically useful (you can’t even fly at night or in weather without an instrument rating). I would love to get my PP, but even in a well-paying field it’s just inaccessible without dedicating a lot more than I’m ready to give.
- akiselev 4y ago
  The GA manufacturing industry seems to have entered death spiral. With the fall in popularity of GA, the number of planes made every year went way down which drove the price of both new and used planes up. We went from producing almost 20,000 GA planes a year in the 1970s to under a thousand a year in the 1990s and it's barely recovered since then (1,500 a year IIRC)
  - IAmNotACellist 4y ago
    Let me guess, the nadir happened in 1971?
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  You can get the JAR-PPL SEP license for 10k exactly here in Europe (Spain -prepaid course) and everyone tells me that the US is cheaper. It's expensive yes but not out of reach of most people. Once you start looking into CPL, night rating, multiple engine etc that's when it gets expensive.
- bobsomers 4y ago
  > you can’t even fly at night or in weather without an instrument rating Minor nit: You can fly at night with a Private Pilot's certificate, but it must be under VFR like all your daytime flying.
  - blueslurpee 4y ago
    This differs in Europe, where some NAA's view night flying as equivalent to IFR.

willnonya 4y ago

This is the source of the current shortage. It is much more time consuming and expensive just to become a commercial pilot now. This has completely disrupted the progression and training in the pipeline and will not be alleviated by halving the pilot requirements. When this flight hour change runs head first into a large number of pilots retiring the entire industry is going to be in a state of emergency.

bombcar 4y ago
We solve that by going to war; the military is perfectly fine sticking a 19 year old with 20 hours of stick time behind the controls of a supply plane. And when the war is over we have a glut of pilots.

biomcgary 4y ago

Why not require a pilot with 1.5k of hours and allow co-pilots with 250+ hours for cargo and 500+ hours for passenger? It would decrease the upfront cost of getting trained as a pilot before getting paid.

rdtwo 4y ago
Most of the major airplane accidents in the last decade were caused by those low hour pilots
josefx 4y ago
Some accidents where caused by pilot and copilot providing conflicting input. Having two pilots pilots with significant training differences has the potential to make things worse.
- nradov 4y ago
  Which accidents are those? Pilot training has long emphasized the importance of having only one pilot actively flying the aircraft at a time, while the other acts as a monitor.
  - josefx 4y ago
    2009 Air France 447. The copilot was panicking and never let go of the controls even after vocally handing them over. The pilot only seemed to realize this shortly before the crash. The wiki page for it mentions a lot of other issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 . Including an offhand remark by the pilot that he only had one hour of sleep and warnings that only sounded when the plane was in a remotely sane orientation.
- hulitu 4y ago
  They need a manager in the cockpit.