When I started flying 50 years ago, I dreamed of becoming a pilot for an airline. However, there was a huge supply of others who wanted to become a commercial pilot, too. I never flew more than 800 hours before the financial burden of children halted my flying 35 years ago.
When I learned that the Germanwings co-pilot had only 630 hours, I was astounded. And he had been a commercial co-pilot for a while. How many hours did he have when he first co-piloted a commercial jet with passengers? How many times had he landed an A320 from the right seat before there were paying passengers? What are the minimum requirements? Do other countries have and Airline Transport rating (which requires at least 1200(?) hours)
If you’re asking what are the minimum qualifications to get the rating, you might want to check the FAA website, or that of whatever country’s official aviation agency website.
If you’re asking what are the minimum qualifications to actually get hired as a co-pilot for a commercial airliner, you’d want to check the website of the airline that’s doing the hiring.
I would be curious to know how much of the hiring decision is quantitative based on hours flown, number of ratings held, exam scores, etc. and how much is based on soft interview questions (e.g. “Tell me about a time when you displayed leadership” or “What is your greatest weakness?”) E.g. can a person with terrible soft skills virtually guarantee hire by running their experience numbers way way up until they exceed those of the other candidates, or are airlines more into finding people that they like that also happen to have the minimum hours required?
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought the Germanwings copilot had 630 hours as a Germanwings employee, not a grand total of 630 hours.
AIUI, Germanwings is a division of Lufthansa.
Going back to my foray into aviation, I believe Lufthansa did ab initio training* - they hired people with zero hours and taught them to fly.
630 hours of top-of-the-line flight training is worth a lot more than 2000 of CFI in a 152.
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- they don’t have to erase any bad habits a person may have picked up getting to the 3000 hour minimum some US airlines require.
As I understand it, the Lufthansa Flight Training Pilot School in Bremen, Germany virtually has a monopoly for training of commercial airline pilots in Germany (and AFAIK they even conduct the training for aspiring German Air Force pilots for certain types of planes).
Once you are accepted into this program and you subsequently pass all the tests and show that you have the potential to be a pilot, you are more or less guaranteed a job in the industry. You don’t have to pay upfront for your training but you do, however, incur a pile of debts which you have to pay back later. It’s a form of student loan. This might have been an issue for the Germanwings co-pilot.