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Our industry is a wonderful example of the invisible bureaucracy because everyone past the hump already never had to notice the effects, but now that we’re seeing huge retirement waves everyone’s really freaking out. (their solution of course is to jam fat sheboons into cessnas in arizona to make more black women pilots, totally gonna go great)

I point it out with old guys every time I can when they complain about how “man we just can’t find enough pilots!” - we had a crash in 2009 that led congress to impose a hard experience min on airline operators for their pilots, which, depending on operator, could have bumped up their demands by 5x.

A whole lot of them laugh and say they started working with like, 300, maybe 500 hours back in the day. To get that exact same job today, they’d need 1500 (or 1250 if they went to college for $120k in student loans and a worthless degree about ‘aviation factors’) I should be a lot farther along, I sometimes work with old timers who are surprised I’m ‘slumming’ it as a ferry nigger and when I describe the lay of the industry they refuse to believe me. They tell me “go do banner tow!” or “crop dusting!” without knowing that in the 50 years since they did it as a bright eyed beginner, decades of accidents led to those jobs demanding just as much experience as the airlines do. Those jobs are just as expensive as ever, too, so while you could work as a banner guy, you’ll be disappointed when you only log 10 hours a month - when was the last time you even saw a sky banner?

Everyone’s basically asking for 1,500 hours, with a bunch of odd caveats, and it’s both insanely expensive and extremely competitive when there’s only about 1/10th of the amount of experience-building work available to kids starting out. We’re literally forcing young guys to get FIVE TIMES the work experience to step in the door that their dad had to. Our chief started here with 370 about 25 years back, he was brought on to ferry the chickens from one place to another and before you know it he wound up overseeing the department altogether. He was made entirely in-house. Now I think the lowest guy we hired in the last 10 years was a ‘kid’ (26) who’d been working as a CFI for 5 years at the local “flying uni” and only had about 700 hrs in all. There just aren’t enough hours for you under that ponzi scheme, you can’t have every student graduate to ‘work” as an instructor with a 1:1 ratio.

That’s crazy to me. It’s all instructing now if you want to get the minimum experience. (which is why it sucks, quality-wise. Nobody cares to teach well, they just fill the square and churn out more low-quality aviators)

RT: https://poa.st/objects/5ae960da-57bb-47a9-9ba0-2a20ada85d71

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