Pilots who apply for cockpit jobs at United and other major airlines typically must have 5,000 to 7,000 hours of flying time. Smaller JetBlue Airways requires at least 4,000.
Charlie Preusser had 383. Nonetheless, he got a job as a co-pilot two years ago, "and I was not the low-time pilot in my new hire class," he says. His employer was a commuter airline, of the the workhorse carriers that ferry passengers to and from smaller cities for bigger partners.
A string of commuter-airline accidents in recent years has put these carriers and their pilots in the spotlight. A February crash near Buffalo, NY took 50 lives after a pilot evidently tried to overide an automatic safety feature. In 2006, another commuter airline plane crashed on takeoff from Lexington, KY when the pilots chose the wrong runway, costing 49 lives. Seven of the last eight fatal airliner accidents in the U.S. involved these smalller carriers.
The government mandated asingle level of safety across the aviation industry in 1997. Yet lapses, from running low on fuel to letting planes go nearly into a stall, continue to occur signicantly more often with the turboprops and small jets of commuter airlines than with the major carriers flying big jetliners.
The commuter airlines, their regulators and even Congress are working on a range of initiatives to turn this around. A key part of the task is figuring out what led to the dismal record. One thing that stands out: Some of the mostdifficult routes and grueling schedules are flown by pilots with the least experience and training.
Behind that, in turn, are economic pressures, especially a move by major airlines to outsources more flying to carriers with smaller planes and lower costs. Last year, commuter airlines-also called regional airelines-handled 159 million U.S. passengers , up from 82 million in 2001. They flew half of domestic airline flights, carrying one in four u.s. passengers.
But as they strained to meet demand, some lowered their requirements for new pilots and widened their recruiting nets to lesser-known, often unaccredited flight schools. Cost pressures have kept the comuuter lines, whose planes often bear the names of their major airline partners , from fully matching those carrier's fancy in-house training centers, filled with state-of-the-artflight simulators and large staffs. The result often is a two tier training system-a situation regulators and some in Congress now are determined to change.
"All see on the fuselage is the brand name of the carrier," and they want to be assured "the same competence and judgment exists in the cockpit regardless of the size of the plane," says Sen. Byron Dorgan, chairman of a Senate aviation subcommittee.
The Regional Airline Association says its memebers somply with all federal rules, maintain high safety standards, have been improving safety for 35 years and are expanding their safety efforts this year. Among other initiatives, the trade group says it is undertaking a study of pilot fatigue and reviewing all National Transporation Safety Board safety recommendations. Commuter airlines employ many veteran pilots who benefited from top-of-the-line training, in addition to those with less training and experience.
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