My View From the Right Seat
Reminicing About the Past
I will never forget my time working at my first First Officer position. I was hired on by Bighorn Airways to fill a personnel gap that had opened up right when I was leaving the Air Force. I just happened to send my application in late one Sunday night and it happened to be the first email in the Chief Pilot's inbox.
About a week and a half after my last day as Space Acquisitions Officer, I found myself up in Alaska being the last pilot to be trained by Randy Leypoldt to fly the CASA 212 cargo aircraft. I will never forget Randy for a number of reasons, but the biggest was that he was tough but fair. He needed to get me up and running and fast, so he put me through the ringer. But when I passed my checkride for the type rating, he looked over at me and told me that I had room for improvement, but I had the makings of a great pilot.
I won't lie. I just about broke down into tears after hearing that, mostly because of dealing with the relentless psychological abuse that are ATP Flight Academy's Upper Management and the USAF Pilot Training pipeline where any deviation means that you are obviously a terrible pilot and everything should be done to wash you out.
However, what happened after that was something has stuck with me to this day.
Randy, Mark George, another SIC who I can't recall the name of, and myself went to the Airport Way Restaurant in Fairbanks for breakfast. Generally, it was a tradition, but I didn't always go with them (mostly to get an extra hour of sleep in). Looking back at it, I was glad I went that time because after sitting down, Randy went on a rant about pilot training and how he hated the new hires, specifically all the pilots that had been hired on straight from being flight instructors after picking up 1500 Hours. They couldn't do basic pilot things; specifically I remember him pointing out how they couldn't hold heading and altitude and were fixated on flying the magenta line.
I don't recall the entire rant since it's been a few years, but it's something that I've heard from other pilots over the last few years. We've managed to pigeon hole pilots into a new pipeline that's only hurt them and the aviation industry as a whole.
The Pilot Pipeline in the Pre-2014 US
When I took my first flying lesson in the Fall of 1996, aviation was a vastly different landscape in the United States. Much like current day Canada and the Bahamas (and a laundry list of other nations), your typical pilot path would look something like this;
That pipeline process worked since the end of the Second World War and is still used outside of the United States. There are many reasons it worked well;
Canada, the Bahamas, and Europe still operate this way, however, after the Colgan Air crash in Buffalo, things changed, and not for the better.
The Pilot Pipeline in Post-2014 US
Since the regulations changed at the start of Fiscal Year 2014, the pipeline looks more like this;
This new pipeline has started to cause issues.
And the issues aren't isolated. I've experienced them first hand.
The Failure of Post-2014 US Pilot Pipeline or How I Ended up Nearly Inverted in a Beech 1900 Simulator
In 2022, I was at ATS - Denver, a Part 142 Flight Training Center, with another pilot whom we shall call Andy. Andy held an ATP License - Aircraft Multi-Engine Land with Instrument and had logged 1800 Hours Total Time. However, he'd never flown a Multi-Crew aircraft and hadn't been at the controls much, even after getting an ATP. In fact, the airline we were going to work at was his first First Officer position.
The airline recommended that both of us get a Multi-Engine IPC and BFR before attending the course, which I did. It actually worked out great because I called an acquaintance of mine, Greg, who ran a flight school in the Denver Area, so I was able to get both scheduled and knocked out a few days before the course started.
After making it through the crucible that was the one week ground portion that was taught by one of the Electrical Engineers who designed the Beech 1900 (I love the guy, but... goddamn was that painful), we finally moved on to the Simulator portion. Our instructor, who worked for SkyWest, asked who would go first, and I made the mistake of volunteering. Andy, who had never flown Multi-Crew before, missed every call out and was basically quiet as a church mouse the whole two hours. Needless to say, I became frustrated (and I wasn't the only one because our instructor was too). He reset the sim and told us to take a breather for a minute before we switched.
Andy jumps into the FO Seat and I take the Captain's chair and we start the sim from the top. Our instructor clears us for takeoff, and Andy immediately, and violently, goes balls to the wall on the throttle. If you've never flown turboprops or any kind of turbine aircraft, you generally don't want to do that unless it's an emergency. Why? Because you can very easily overtorque the engine(s). Which he did. So, as acting captain, I have to adjust the thottles to bring the torque down into an acceptable range while making my call outs as we roll down the runway.
To quote the popular historian and podcaster Steven Bell, "But wait, it gets worse!"
When I call rotate, Andy yanks the controls back as hard as he can, basically pulling the yolk right to his pecs. The nose rises, we start climbing through 1,000 feet while the attitude indicator goes past 45 degrees and up to 60 degrees. The right wing starts to drop as our instructor and I are sitting there dumbfounded as the right roll continues going past 90 degrees bringing us nearly inverted as the nose drops through the horizon. Needless to say the instructor ended the sim before we fully found ourselves in a 4 G, inverted dive in the simulator (though that did become a bit of an inside joke), but he was fuming as he called it a day. Then again, so was I, but I was hiding it a bit more.
After we walked out of the sim, Andy wandered off to make a phone call, and I had a chat with our instructor. Both of us were on the same page, and I allowed the lid off the boiling pot of frustration. The instructor said, in no uncertain terms, that I was basically carrying Andy through this training because of my previous experience, and he was concerned that Andy wouldn't survive without me there. I agreed, mostly because I had noticed that Andy seemed far more fixated on the Checkride and whom was administering it instead of focusing on the here and now, but I also voiced my concern over whether or not he'd gotten an IPC and BFR prior to starting training like I had.
Roughly 12-ish hours later, we were in one of ATS's other sims, specifically their non-full motion sim that Alpine used mostly for flow training, but was also free to use for anyone (which was a godsend since it's $2,500/hr per person to use the full motion ones). We jumped into the sim, and I gave him some very simple instructions; just take off and i'll give him headings and altitudes to hold but he can't use the autopilot.
And then history started to repeat itself immediately. The only difference was that I had no problem jumping in and taking control during the takeoff before leveling us off and giving them back to him. I gave him several headings and altitudes to fly, but he never managed to hold either. Eventually, after around 2 hours, we called it a day. He asked me what was wrong, and I told him exactly what I had noticed; he had no instrument scan.
I confronted Andy over taking the IPC and BRF, which he had said he'd done, but it was extremely obvious that he hadn't. He finally broke down and admitted that he hadn't done either. That was when he wandered off again and declared his intention to pause training, which left me basically standing there trying to figure out what I should do. I was given the choice of pausing training or continuing, but I'd have to find someone to fly with. I decided to keep going (I was already having to pay for the type rating out of pocket, and I wasn't going to stop everything now that I was over halfway through the course).
Luckily for me, there were a few Canadian pilots from a Québécois airline. While they were slightly hesitant at first, the promise of getting more sim time for basically free won them over. You'd be surprised how many pilots jump at free flight time.
Pigeonholed Pilots
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While my tale of type ratings does have a happy ending, at least for myself and the Canadians, it raises a lot of issues in the Post-Colgan Air era; the pigeonholing of pilots to becoming instructors.
Pigeonholing, for those who don't know, is an old term meaning "to assign to an often restrictive category." Type casting, where an actor or actress finds themselves being given specific roles in films and never being able to branch out, also works, but we're dealing with pilots and not actors.
Often, when someone says they've been pigeonholed, they mean that they're stuck holding a certain position for longer than they should, whether it's preceived or whether it's actually happening. If anyone has ever been in the National Guard, pigeonholing is quite common after reaching the rank of E-4 since there are very few E-5 positions and above that are available (until someone dies or retires). The problem is that pilots are being pigeonholed into becoming instructors.
Not all pilots are cut out to be an instructor, and not all pilots want to be instructors regarless of hours. Since 1996, I've met pilots with lots of hours who couldn't teach a fish to breathe under water while also meeting pilots with less than 500 hours who could teach nuclear physics to a 5 year old and they'd comprehend it. I've met pilots who loved teaching, and I've met pilots who were literally only instructors so they could milk students for flight time. It's no different from how not every person is cut out to be a teacher or want to be a teacher.
The problems start when you begin forcing everyone to become a teacher.
The natural defense I will hear from commenters is "The FIA Checkride has an 80% First Time Failure Rate! That's how we gate keep!" Ok. There are just a few problems with that;
This isn't gate keeping. Gate keeping involves making sure pilots that don't want to be flight instructors or aren't cut out be flight instructors don't become flight instructors. But the normal options for them are basically gone now.
The Life of a Non-FIA
As someone who doesn't hold an FIA, I can tell you first hand that it is nearly impossible to both build hours and to find a job in the United States. Most Part 135s aren't looking for First Officers, the usual starting position, and the few that do usually want pilots with 1000 Total Time at minimum. The ones that are willing to hire below 1000 Total Time are the extreme minority.
Yes, you might be able to go work for Southern Express with 500 Hours, but good luck if you have more than one checkride failure or aren't a part of an airline's Pilot Pathway Program. And don't talk to them if you're looking for something long-term. They're interested in prestiege hires and being able to point to how many of their pilots go on to work at SkyWest or Air Wisconsin or Horizon Air. And then they wonder why they can't keep any PICs and are constantly posting job openings for them. I know all this from experience, and even though I get along fine with the owner, their HR manager is another story (or was. I don't know if they fired her. I hope they did. I would say she had the interpersonal skills of a dead fish, but that's an insult to dead fish.)
Your other options are to go to a foreign country or start your own Part 135 Single Pilot VFR Charter Service. I've done that too.
I loved working for Southern Air Charter out of Nassau, but the main issue came down to not getting many flight hours. Most of your hops are 20 minutes and you only work 6 hours a day on a 4 on/4 off schedule. I'd certainly be willing to go back and fly for them again, but I'd rather do that as a PIC than an SIC.
The other option is Canada. While you do have to convert your licenses in either country, it's easier to do in the Bahamas, though Canada isn't terrible. Their agreement with the FAA allows pilots to convert their license via exam; pay roughtly $25 USD to take the FAACA and then another $25 USD to take the FAAIA conversion exams, then pay the $100 Fee for the license. Downside is that you can only take those exams at Transport Canada Facilities. Imagine if the only way you could take your FAA Commercial Pilot License exam was to take it at the FSDO, and they only offered testing on specific days at specific times rather than having the test be available at almost every flight school in the US. And that's just for the license conversion. To get a job, you have to take either the IATRA or the ATPL Written Exams in addition to tracking down a Canadian airline that would be willing to sponsor you for a work visa.
Then there's starting your own Part 135 Single Pilot VFR Charter. Firstly, you need to make sure you meet Part 135.243(b) or will meet those requirements by the time you make it to the top of the list. Then, you have to fill out the Pre Application Statement of Intent. Then... well, you sit around and wait, and while you wait, you need to make sure you get all the paperwork in order;
It's a really long list and that's without adding the use of an Electronic Flight Bag.
The reason why I don't have an Air Operator Certificate right now is that we were having issues with the Compliance Statement/Letter of Compliance. I tried writing it myself before subcontracting it out to another company. Unfortunately, that other company never sent me an updated version, so I had to withdraw the application. For now. I'm still waiting on that little piece of paperwork before I reapply.
But that really doesn't solve anything. The main question is; how do we fix it?
Lessons from Canada
Honestly? It wouldn't be difficult to fix if we look towards our neighbor to the north. Canada allows pilots with less than 1500 hours to fly Charter, Air Taxi, Commuters, and Regionals so long as they meet certain prerequisites and generally have better organization when it comes to differentiating between what regulation applies to what operation.
A reorganization like this would inherently allow pilots to enter the work force at lower hours, meaning that;
ALPA and other detractors might say that a plan such as this, "Undermines safety and will kill passengers!"
If that were true, then there should be daily reports of airline crashes in Canada and Europe. Unfortunately for ALPA, that isn't reality.
Yes, aircraft do crash, however, if you look at trends or just watch an episode of Air Crash Investigation, you'll notice that pilots with more than 1500 Total Time, regardless if they hold an ATPL or a CPL, are the ones crashing planes and killing passengers.
The pilot of a Pilatus PC-12 registered N128CM which crashed in Butte, Montana, killing himsel and 13 passengers was an ex-USAF C-141 Starlifter pilot and ATPL holder with 8,840 Total Time and was ultimately responsible for the safe operation of the aircraft.
Marvin Renslow, the Pilot in Command of Colgan 3407, held an ATPL with 3,200 Total Time and was ultimately responsible for the safe operation of the aircraft when he killed himself, Rebecca Shaw, 2 flight attendants, 45 passengers, and one person on the ground.
Captain Veldhuyzen van Zanten was the Pilot in Command of KLM 4805 held an ATPL with 11,700 Total Time, was the Chief Pilot for KLM, and was also ultimately responisble for the safe operation of his aircraft when he killed 234 passengers and 14 crewmembers on his aircraft plus 335 passengers and crew on Pan Am 1736.
I could easily keep listing more, but we'd be here all day.