A lot is being made of how much – or how little – time the Asiana Flight 214 pilot had in flying the Boeing 747. I’ve read several articles where the author has said “I wouldn’t fly if I knew the pilot had 40 hours of training on the plane.” The news media has been making so much about the amount of training time the pilot had and the fact that it was the supervisory pilots first training flight.
That got me thinking. Several airlines have taken delivery of Boeing 787 Dreamliners and Airbus A380s in the last year. How do pilots get trained on those planes? Someone’s got to be the first pilot to “get behind the wheel” so to speak. Sure, they all go through the training classes, but actual flying time, how do they gain that experience?
Would you not fly on a Boeing 787 or A380 if you knew that the pilot was in his/her first, second or third flight? The pilots are seasoned on other planes, right?
How much does it matter to you?
Yes and no. I only have about 80 hours (total) and I’ve never crashed a plane. I would expect someone with 9,000 or 10,000 hours to do better. I’ll be curious to see what the NTSB’s final report says, but right now it doesn’t look good for these guys.
The real questions I have are:
-Which carriers hire pilots with just 250 hours of flying time?
-Which carriers STRONGLY DISCOURAGE pilots from manually flying their aircraft – and hold them to account when they do?
The sense I get from the discussions over at pprune.org this is fairly common with many carriers in Asia. It would be VERY GOOD to know which carriers take this approach.
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It was a 777, not 747.