Good points GusNSpot. ad hoc charter can be far more demanding than scheduled work as you are at the mercy of a single client and may be under significant direct commercial pressure. In scheduled work the commercial pressure, if any, comes via the company and it’s much easier to tell a company operations man to stick his suggestions up his arse than it is to send a similar message directly to the passengers.
I don’t know about type ratings. There mustn’t be any 240s operating in Australia as it doesn’t appear on our type rating list, however the Convair 340 and 440 which are improved versions of the 240 are under one rating so I’d suspect the 240 would be as well. No doubt there is an FAA document with similar information. So did the Captain have lots of time in Convairs, 68 hours of which was in the aircraft that crashed; did he have lots of time in Convairs, 68 hours of which were in the 240 model; or did he only have 68 hours total in Convair types combined. It’s ambiguous and possible he was very inexperienced.
OT: The songs “Shut Up and Get on the Plane”, “Greenville to Baton Rouge” and “Angels and Fuselage” by Drive-By Truckers recount the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash. They appear on the album Southern Rock Opera.
Aerosmith’s flight crew had inspected the same plane earlier in 1977, but rejected it for use by the band, believing neither the plane nor the crew were up to proper standards.