From what I have heard from European airline pilots, the reason they don’t fly light a/c anymore is that they’ve lost their SEP rating. Typical scenario: work, then family commitments, then bad a/c availability and hey, presto, you don’t have the hours to reval by experience. When I was living in Spain, I often flew with a friend who had exactly that issue. The fact that he is a vastly better pilot than I can ever aspire to be doesn’t matter to the regulator….
Is there still a rule requiring a medical examination if more hours than some stated figure are flown in a month? I seem to remember a quite high figure from 1964 Air Law. 
Peter wrote:
the union rules.
What union? It’s not like all airline pilots belong to the same one… Also, the union obviously can’t regulate the number of hours their members fly. What they can do is make an agreement with the airline about the maximum number of hours. Why it should be in the interest of the union to include leisure flight hours is beyond me.
AFAIK one reason airline pilots avoid GA is that any flying adds to their annual hours, and they are allowed to fly only X hours a year under the union rules.
kwlf wrote:
Isn’t the other big issue that accidents in their name – even minor ones – are a very big black mark that could be career threatening. I’ve heard a few people say they’d avoid GA for that reason – the risks of mishaps being so many times higher for small aircraft.
I don’t think it’s a particularly big issue. The airline pilots that I know all fly light aircraft too, and a couple of them have had incidents (one, a 777 captain in the UK had a prop strike – the airline didn’t particularly care, another a training captain in the USA actually landed wheels up in his own aircraft, but this has not affected his career).
Bathman wrote:
To me a CPL holder with a current SEP rating should be capable of performing such a flight with the only training required being how to perform the photographic part of the flight.However the following seem to be pretty common
They dont know the VFR minima
They have never actually flown in cloud or visibility that isn’t CAVOK
They dont know/refuse to fly IMC outside of controlled airspace.
They will only fly on a traffic service
They have never flown at an uncontrolled airfield.
They believe you should file a flight plan
They have never used safteycom
Unless they are told which runway is in use they can’t figure out which one to use.
They land and take off with a tailwind.
They have never filled an aircraft with fuel
They have no idea what type of oil to put in. Or even know how to put oil in.
They have never flown into or out of a grass airfield – because they were trained to be airline pilots.
And the one that annoys me more than anything else is they use aileron rather than rudder during the take off roll to remain straight – WTF
An average microlight pilot is a much better “seat of the pants” pilot than the average airline pilot (in some cases at least). In honesty I think this is more a result of keeping things to a minimum. We cannot all be mechanics, aerobatics champions, fighter pilots, bush pilots, top “team workers” in a airline cockpit, Captain material and competent medics when needed. At least we cannot possibly expect that from others, if all they really are trained for is to become apprentices in an airline, where the real learning begins.
On the other hand, I find it odd that the principle of learning to crawl before learning to walk is dismissed like that. Airmanship doesn’t just happen, and it cannot be “legislated” into paragraphs with fancy acronyms (although people seem to believe exactly that). It is a function of all your experiences and training. One of the fundamental experiences is basic understanding and competence of using stick and rudder. Flying is a physical thing which requires “physical understanding”, not some academic exercise.
Airborne_Again wrote:
You’ve better not fly (as pax) with a regional airline in Scandinavia, then.
Reminds me departing Molde last year on a very wide right downwind and the tower querying me repeatedly for my position because of an incoming SAS. I had visual contact with SAS on a right base 2000 feet above and told them so in my position report, but they kept asking for some reason. I am sure I was on the TCAS of the SAS just as I could see SAS on the active traffic system.
what_next wrote:
Is refueling and topping up the oil then?
I would say so, checking the oil should be a pre-flight item. And if it is low one should be within a pilots ability to rectify.
I realise that nearly all the practical flying is learned post ppl. But I still think it’s disappointing people come out with commercial licences without being very rounded.
Aviathor wrote:
I did all my IFR training at Hayward, Stockton, Concord and Livermore. All are towered airports. Does that disqualify me from performing IAP at unmanned airports? I subsequently flew to Sonoma county airport, Clear Lake, Arcata, Provo, Furnace Creek, Shoshone, Harris Ranch and other unmanned airports both IFR and VFR. Never had an issue.
(italics added by me)
OK, fair enough, but it is equally true that a pilot making an IFR approach into an uncontrolled airport in Class E airspace (in let’s say marginal VMC, under VFR, for practice) better know how to make his radio calls so that the VFR aircraft understand what he is doing, and he needs to be practicing see and avoid as he enters the pattern. After switching to the Advisory Frequency from Approach, he might need to call a 2 mile straight-in or make correct VFR position calls for all aspects of his non-precison ‘circle to land’ approach using VFR terminology, not use IFR waypoint names and coordinate with VFR traffic on the radio. Also, he or a safety pilot needs to be looking for non-radio traffic. And he needs to do all that simultaneous with flying the IFR procedure. I think there’s a lot to know.
Last time I flew as safety pilot with a friend in his DA40, doing some IFR practice approaches under VFR into a number of controlled and uncontrolled fields in the space of 60 or 70 minutes, one IFR approach included what the local VFR pilots would see as a straight-in, which generally annoys them slightly, into an uncontrolled field. I watched as the situation at the airport developed and then at the appropriate time on short final told my friend to take off his hood and turn right 30 degrees. Lots of parachute canopies were open in front of us, dropping into the airport slightly to the left side of the runway… The missed approach procedure was not going to work as written that day. 
I guess one beneficial thing about the local sausage machine flight schools is that they actually do quite a lot of the above in the course of getting an instrument rating, although those of us flying VFR may get nervous when hearing a foreign accent flying a Dutchess announcing a straight in on CTAF, particularly if he mentions some IFR waypoint we’ve never heard of.
Silvaire wrote:
Just like learning ag operations is not a 30 minute task,
I did all my IFR training at Hayward, Stockton, Concord and Livermore. All are towered airports. Does that disqualify me from performing IAP at unmanned airports? I subsequently flew to Sonoma county airport, Clear Lake, Arcata, Provo, Furnace Creek, Shoshone, Harris Ranch and other unmanned airports both IFR and VFR.
. Never had an issue.
Let’s not go overboard one way or the other. We do not like to go outside our comfort zone which is different from one individual to the next based on individual experience or lack thereof in a particular field. Some swear that they won’t fly anything else than IFR. Others that they will never set foot in a single-engine piston. To yet others night flying in SEP is a no-no. Others again feel that warm and fuzzy feeling when they have someone to talk to when landing. That’s the way it is.
