If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to do
Is to fly every day ’til 1,500 hours pass away
Just to get a flying job or two.*
Some of the best and most thoughtful conversations I have had with people have taken place as we gazed into a fire. Back when I was a Boy Scout, the campfire subjects ran the gamut from girls to girls. Now the fires I stare into are burning at airplane campouts, and the subject has veered from girls into minimum time requirements for pilot ratings and professional flying jobs.
Kermit, my college-aged and pilot-aspiring nephew, put a marshmallow on a stick and, approaching the fire, blurted out what absolutely nobody else was thinking:
“FAR part 61.159 sucks!” he said.
The older pilots in our camping group, including me, took a moment to soak in Kermit’s passionate statement about the 1,500-hour rule. We gently blew the flames out on our marshmallows and joined the conversation as we reached for the graham crackers and chocolate.
“What is the nature of time and why are hours so daggum important to being considered a competent and safe pilot?” intoned my friend Frank, who had well north of 30,000 hours piloting various aircraft. “I don’t think I got much smarter between the end of my first 10,000 hours and the beginning of my third 10,000,” he said.
I had to agree. I have tons of hours like Frank, but I would be the first to admit that the smartest and most informed pilot in my cockpit was often my first officer. The most significant advantage I had over people with less time was that I had seen and experienced far more than they had.
My practiced rheumy eyes might have noticed things that may not have bothered them, but bugged the bejesus out of me. On other occasions, my aged and wrinkled face was a reassuring, albeit sobering, one as I said I saw the problem we were looking at and, based on my experience, it was no big deal.
Of course, the problem with flying an airplane that is on fire (and I have done that at least twice) is that there is no way to plan for it other than a simulator-based playdate, which has the disadvantage of not really making you think you are going to die.
Part of me wants upcoming pilots to have to get their jobs the way I had to. I spent over 3,000 hours wrestling the controls of various airplanes, from firefighting missions and hauling dead bodies to, most frightening of all, flight instructing, before the airline world gave me the nod.
“Daggum it, these young whippersnappers should daggum earn it!” my angry old man, over-inflated ego screams into the void.
Of course, hating young people because they are young is a pointless and (my wife tells me) an off-putting behavior, especially around my kids.
Then my old man yells to nobody particular again: “When I was coming up in the ancient 1970s and 80s you either had to fly scutwork jobs like towing banners or dropping poison on fire ants or you had to go in the military, shave your head and have Louis Gossett Jr. scream at you as he demanded your DOR while you did sit-ups as he was hosing you down.”
Then, if you were plucky enough and had nowhere else to go but the Navy, or the fire ant poison didn’t kill you, enough flying hours were accumulated so you could move up in the ratings and go from snorting cancer-causing chemicals all day to sipping on decaf with a half a Sweet ‘N Low that a charming flight attendant brought up just for you.
Another thing left out of my Marvel Avengers-like pilot origin story is the fantastic amount of fun I had doing all of that flying before I was offered a sideways-facing seat in a 727. There is almost nothing better than being twenty and flying through the skies in a Cessna 310 while wearing a leisure suit and getting paid.
Kermit was coming down off his sugar high and began to make sense.
“You know,” he said, “This whole time equals competence thing is really dumb, but I wonder what we can use as a unit of measurement to replace it.”
“For example,” he continued, “at my school, FSU, the degree requirements are based on academic hours. Competence is measured by meeting or exceeding the minimums.
“If you are taking a three-credit-hour history class, you can get a good grade by passing a test or writing a paper. There is no way to measure the extra competence gained by motivated students who spent an additional 60 or 70 hours doing deep research that is not on the test.
A private pilot candidate with their 40 or 50 hours might be more proficient than a Cherokee weekend flyer with over 200 hours.”
I sat aghast at my nephew’s wisdom. Kermie was right, and I thought of a weird side note to his comments.
Pilots who have graduated from a college aviation program are afforded the benefit of only needing 1,000 hours. This is strange to me because they are the ones that are not out in the real world scaring themselves to death flying charters, towing banners, and flight instructing.
I fail to see how earning an “A” in “Chock 101” is a decent substitute for an inadvertent encounter with a thunderstorm or an angry charter passenger.
By the time Kermit was done speaking, we were all getting a little drowsy. We had a big day of flying, and it was getting late: after 9 p.m., my campout bedtime. We were so tired that we had given up on roasting our marshmallows and were eating our s’more ingredients raw.
Frank summed it up for all of us as we stuffed our faces.
“I think there should be a better way to do the ratings and job requirements that aren’t based on flight hours,” he said, “but none of us have a good idea on how to go about it.”
“You have to wonder,” he added, “what a large group of pilots—say readers of a non-AI aviation news source—would have to say about that.”
It was eerie. It was as if Frank was staring through and breaking a fourth wall.
*with apologies to Jim Croce
The ‘1500 hour rule sucks’ argument gets tiring. Kermit’s frustration is understandable but the comparisons and anecdotes expressed also reflect a shallow immaturity from ungained experience. Slight pun there. Frank thinks he didn’t gain any smarts after a certain number of hours….oh yes he did. And he did it without even knowing it because every flight he flew after the last was a test. Today’s flight is a test of all knowledge, smarts, and WISDOM gained from all previous cumulative experiences. And what is gained is not always realized because it is not always immediately tangible – like a test score written on a piece of paper – until that one time when it is needed. You say that other than the sim, you never prepared for a fire. But I’d be willing to bet that during quiet times with just you and your thoughts, you have thought about what you would do with an aircraft on fire and many other possible unfortunate in-flight events. That in itself is preparation, individual informal planning. Do the “Chocks 101” courses teach that? Probably not. But you know, from your thousands of hours of experience, that you have think about and plan for it.
Measurements will always be used to evaluate competency. And for the time being, units of time are the best thing we’ve got to predictively measure a person’s ability to safely handle a situation that hasn’t happened yet. There’s no other way around it until AI advances enough to read minds. ….And that’s a whole different and scary topic.
How about the more defined the hours, the fewer required? Minimum of x% actually hand-flown. No more than x% flown from same airport. x% of landings at Class B vs C vs D vs uncontrolled. Radar vs non-radar environment. VFR/pilotage nav vs IFR nav.
Military trng (my background) applies pressure throughout trng and operational pipeline, washout is real, permanent threat, and one can’t go shopping for another instructor/school/job if you do. Similar to experience you highlighted, you get turned loose with demanding equipment in demanding situations early/often.
Number of non-ATP civilian pilots I’ve met who are shocked that their competence is “judged” by others is shocking to me. Every military flight is “judged”.
Frank’s point that “…there should be a better way to do the ratings and job requirements that aren’t based on flight hours, … but none of us have a good idea on how to go about it.” says it all, along with Kermit’s wondering what else is there in the way of units to measure experience. What we’re really talking about here is “seasoning”, literally “wrestling with airplanes” as you say Kevin, during the passage of the seasons – winter, spring, summer, autumn if you work far enough away from the equator, or dry season and rainy season – the migrating intertropical convergence zone if you work nearer the equator. What else is there other than logging the logging of a ticking clock while aloft dealing with that passage of the seasons?
First, what a delightfully written article! Second, I also don’t know how to replace this rule, but will surmise it’s essentially a nod to the untestable factors which make a competent, safe pilot, a Darwin exam if you will. We (at least me) pilots of some experience all know a few multi-thousand hour comrades that we’d never fly with, and some low time pilots that we would. The main difference is ATTITUDE, an overlapping precursor to wisdom. Way back, my CFI at the time told me that his main purpose was enabling me to learn to fly without killing myself (and/or him) in the process. An exaggeration perhaps, but with a large kernel of truth. While the quality of instruction varies hugely (sometimes criminally so), one both cannot teach everything, nor can one teach the unteachable or the lazy. It’s a bit like high school (these days) vs. college. In HS, everyone passes. If they don’t, it’s the teacher’s or schools or whatever’s fault. College puts that (or at lease used to) on the student, coddling is over, failure is an option. The 1,000/1,500 hour rule introduces that option to the prospective airline pilot; an option to make a small smokey hole rather than a much larger one later.
Ha ha! “Of course, the problem with flying an airplane that is on fire…”
A thought provoking article Mr. Garrison. What is the old saying – “There are pilots with a 1000 hours of experience and pilots with one hour of experience a thousand time over”. My first instructor told me to gain experience, I should fly as many different aircraft to as many different airports in as much different weather as I could to gain experience. I think that was pretty good advice, because as Garrison points out the variety of experience you get will give you more tools in the pilot tool chest. So, how much experience should be required for an ATP rating? That would be easier to answer if pilot performance was better quantified. Who would you rather have in the cockpit flying the plane, pilots who got 70s on their written tests, and barely passed their check rides, and whose students often failed their check rides or pilots who aced their written and practical tests, and were equally successful in producing students that did the same. The same goes for flight reviews. A pass/fail approach to evaluating pilot capability does not leave much room to advance higher performers more rapidly than low performers, but such is the nature of a bureaucracy.
Think of your1500 hours as a window to plump up your resume with all the things you’ve done and what you’ve learned the hard way — from experience. Get your multi ATP and make it easy for them to hire you. Flight instruction is great; pipeline patrol is not. Do as much 135 work as you can get. There is no point in crabbing about it. Turn it into an opportunity to show you’ve got more right stuff than your competitors.
Seems a little odd that “cheating death” is a prerequisite for having the “Right Stuff.” But for some, perhaps, the humility necessary to make sound aeronautical decisions has to be taught the hard way. I mean, we don’t all have to burn our hands on the stove to know it is hot.
The justification for the 1500 hour rule prompted in reaction to the crash of Colgan 3407 in 2009, is as stupid as the rule itself. Both pilots had over 1500 hours and experience was not causal. They might as well have prohibited wearing brown socks. The cause was also not talking below 10,000. The cause ( IMHO) was the FOs uncommanded flap retraction in the middle of a flawed stall recovery and insufficient altitude to fly out of it. I feel the sudden loss of lift resulted in a reflex to pull back rather than push forward on the yoke. Had the captain called for flaps up he would have been prepared for what was to come.
If the discussion of how to season low time civilian pilots in the absence of opportunities like check hauling and other 135 flying (the insurance requirements and FAA’s insistence on a Pilot Development Program have closed off many 135 opportunities) is the issue, we need to look at what we do have available which is the availability of high level flight simulators and the deep pockets of airlines to pay for them.
Long course ( and I mean 12-18 months of daily LOFT type sorties ) with a variety of backside of the clock and boring non-event flights that have built-in nuggets of surprise in terms of weather, mechanical or operational just like in real life can expose pilots to judgement-shaping decisions they probably wouldn’t get showing a soft-field takeoff for the 500th time to a student who will likely never fly off anything shorter than a 5000ft ribbon of concrete.
So, as I see the end of a long career that started scrubbing the belly of Cherokee 140s and ends in the left seat of an airliner, I have to agree with your nephew. We need better hours, ( and I disagree that military training, while in some cases is better, is twice as good) not merely 1500.
I am not a 121/ATP guy but nearly all my good friends, are. The rest are mostly military pilots and I was raised in the world of Naval aviation. It seems to me the 1500/1000 rule is like the proverbial “finger in the dike” from the 1848 French children’s story “Le petit éclusier” by Eugénie Foa. After Colgan 3407, Congress, desperate to be viewed as “doing something,” raised the floor, notwithstanding the fact, as others here note, both pilots exceeded that flight time. A common thread in these comments is “attitude,” which as Jeff S. notes, is a precursor to wisdom. The “finger in the dike” may plug a hole, but it doesn’t repair a compromised foundation. I don’t care how many hrs an ATP applicant has. I do care how many hrs, in how many venues, their mentors had.
Kevin’s best work….
If only we had machines that could replicate an airplane to evaluate pilot skill and decision-making in lieu of a set amount of flight hours…
Nice column. It’s really very simple– You pay me// I pay you. When you are building hours and working on your ratings you pay the man for the use of his aircraft that he has an obligation to provide to you in airworthy and serviceable condition. Your rosy, red butt is accommodated to ensure the dollars in your wallet covers the usage and maintenance costs. Now you are a freshly minted “commercial” pilot and are looking for employment. You would like someone to pay you for what you enjoy doing. Eventually you find employment as a swamper or baggage smasher with a small charter company and begin to move up the ladder living in near squalid conditions with the promise of some copilot time “soon”. As you learn about the business side and get a few hours of co-jo time you begin to see the raggedy edge of this business with it’s off hour demands, crazy scheduling and shoestring maintenance. THIS IS WHERE YOU LEARN DECISION MAKING before you even get in the right seat after cleaning all the ice off the wings and tail and ensuring that the fuel WAS INDEED TOPPED OFF AS REQUESTED. Your next question will eventually be ” Is this safe enough to do with my experienced captain considering the weather, T-storms, icing and fog?” If you survive this you will THEN have earned your right seat in a warm, pressurized aircraft with “self loading freight”.
Enjoyable, thoughtful, article!
““I think there should be a better way to do the ratings and job requirements that aren’t based on flight hours,” he said, “but none of us have a good idea on how to go about it.”
I think there is a solution for this problem… well demonstrated in WWII all the way today. We didn’t train 100,000+ pilots in 5 years from no flight experience to pilots of high performance aircraft such as fighters, torpedo/dive bombers, medium to long range bomber, with instrument qualifications, night flying, and formation flying skills. This group of pilots virtually had all weather flight capability in mostly taildraggers, using needle/ball/compass/time/celestial navigation/instrument skills with some landing on carrier decks, other operating on unimproved strips, grass, some off paved or steel mat runways, coral islands runways, always at full gross take off weights … in air cooled, water cooled singles, twins, and four engine airplanes…liaison L-4’s to B-29’s… in 300-400 hours. What was the secret of this success?
Structured course with a variety of airplanes, hp, landing gear configurations, fixed pitch/constant speed props, and power plants. All of the aircraft used had DIFFERENT flight characteristics, DIFFERENT engine(s) to start and manage, DIFFERENT propellor operation from fixed to constant speed, electric and hydraulic.
A Stearman did not fly like a BT-13, a PT-19 did fly like an AT-6, an AT-6 did not fly like a T-50, a P-40 did not fly like a Corsair, an AT-11 did not fly like a B-25, B-17, B-29… you get the idea.
Today, the military uses maybe a Cirrus or Texan II for primary, then to a T-38/T-45, Jayhawk or Lear, then to their squadron assignments via time in their assigned aircraft brought up through squadron like training… that when they arrive at their final duty station there is little difference between the newbie or the veteran in functional performance.
Unfortunately, today in the civilian GA world via the training for an airline career, it’s a 172/Cherokee/Archer/Katana type trainer, used for primary flight training including Instrument/Commercial privileges, the obligory Seneca multi engine requirements, then CFI time in the 172/Cherokee/Archer/Katana repeating their initial training…wash, rinse repeat… until 1500 hours are accrued, then off to the airlines. Then its up to the airlines how they continue a similar one size fits all training paradigm. Now we have 1500 hour practice makes permanent performance with relatively little flying “experience”. Primacy of learning confirms this kind of “experience ” is very hard to unwind, when something unexpected occurs.
To be fair, training and non-combat operational losses in WWII were eye-watering.
Completely agree that lather/rinse/repeat trng is not the right answer. High end simulation has its place trng dangerous scenarios. Real world decision-making has enormous value, but only if followed by reflection and/or debriefing to extract the correct lesson identified…reading comments in various forums over the years has highlighted that not everyone gets that last bit right.
WWII pilot training indeed suffered losses:
Total Entering Training: Over 300,000 cadets entered flight training between 1941-1945.
Total Washed Out: Around 133,000 cadets didn’t earn their wings. 39.9%
13,000+ dying in training accidents. 4.3%
Losses including wash outs and deaths by Stage (Example Figures):
Primary Training: ~27%
Basic Training: ~9%
Advanced Training: ~2.3%
Transition Training (after wings): ~2.3%
Washout rate was high…but not a shock to me. Standards were high, remained high through out the time of 1941-1945. While 13,000+ deaths is a high number, considering the training requirements from basic to squadron transition training and the high performance/complexity aircraft, and theater/region/location of combat operations this training was preparing for, I find this remarkably low. Remember, just as we were training pilots, simultaneously we were training maintenance people including training for the rapid advancement in aircraft performance by model. Stats don’t differentiate losses due to mechanical failure. Going from Wildcat, to Hellcat, to Bearcat in basically 4 years shows the rapid advances in one series of single engine naval fighters. Likewise single model lines such as the P-38, P-40, P-51 evolved quickly that later models had different characteristics over that same time span. B-17 and B-29’s similarity was only they both were designed and developed by Boeing.
All said, excellent pilots result of excellent training in several different kinds of aircraft starting with relatively simple to begin and identify the washout ‘s as early as possible. But once the student who did not wash out, graduating basic training, the weight and power went immediately up. By the time of transition training they were flying aircraft as large as a B-29 within 300-400 hours ready to enter combat with weather issues, formation flying including IFR operations, always leaving at max weight…let alone the stress of combat.
Currently, we offer a professional career path starting in 1700-2500 lb light single trainers, and keep them in those weight, power, and simple complexity trainers for primary, Instrument/commercial, and CFI training, time building, sprinkled in with a multi-engine rating, in a light weight, largely under-powered twin, being trained for an eventual ATP… in mostly light singles leaving most of the flying “experience ” and the wisdom that comes from that “experience” including going from a Seneca to an Embraer on the line AFTER spending 1500 hours of motoring in essentially light training airplanes avoiding stalls, absolutely no spin training, limited crosswind experience, hood IFR, and a commercial checkride is the closest thing to unusual attitudes…mostly taught by equally green instructors accustom to those same airplanes and conditions. And we wonder why it takes so many people to solo 25-75 hours, can program a G1000 and couple an auto pilot but bend trainers in go arounds, crush firewalls with PIO demonstrations, limited stick/rudder skills, losing control taxiing/.take off/landing in crosswinds, and training only to pass a minimum test standards.
For professional airlines/corporate/charter career training:
Primary in Decathlon, Husky, Maule type aircraft including spins and upset training. Analog panels only leading to PPL checkride.
Advanced training in Cessna 185 including introduction to glass panel, GPS operation, auto pilot.
Multi training in starting in Baron ending in King Air 90. Instrument/commercial training and rating in Baron.
CFI competent in all above
Basic jet experience to round out candidate in Citation for a portion of the time building.
That would be a very productive 1500 hours making the graduate a very sought after pilot with “wisdom” rather than just “experience.”
Agree with all the above. Share your concern that current output at 1500 hrs are effective at monitoring autopilot in benign acft in benign conditions…we put pilots in the cockpit to handle the days that the automation isn’t working and conditions (acft/environment) are anything but benign.
The irony is that now every PPL student is taught to fly an airliner, it shows in the pattern, ridiculous checklists and a fear to tread anywhere outside the heart of the flt envelop, all while flying IFR on CAVU days to get that hamburger.