It’s not that hard to learn to take off and land in the local bounce pattern. I’ve always said I could teach a monkey to do that.
It’s not even that hard to take off on a CAVU day and follow the highway to the next airfield and land there.
But, there’s a big difference between local field ops with no one in your aircraft but you and a passenger filled aircraft in bad weather with not everything going according to plan. It is that hard and not every private pilot has the specialized skill (or stones) required to do the job day in and day out.
The local commuter guys don’t get paid enough in my professional opinion.
I still don’t see how paying them more would mean they were more experienced.
And I didn’t mean to suggest that experience wasn’t important. But the only way to get experience is to actually fly, and the only way for most people to get enough hours flying to gain experience is to get paid to do so, and paying lower wages while people get the experience is a common thing in many industries.
The reason pilots get paid so little is that a LOT of people are qualified to be pilots, and a lot of people would LOVE to be pilots, so there is a lot of supply of willing workers, compared to the demand for pilots.
The rules requiring experience for the major hauls lowers the supply of workers, thus driving up the cost of those workers, so they get paid more money.
So I guess rather than arguing over this, I should have asked the question, is there any evidence that paying regional pilots more money would have prevented any regional airline accidents?
Are there more-experienced pilots out there who simply won’t work the regionals because the pay is too low, and therefore we are stuck with less-capable pilots? (well, the answer to that is probably yes). But the real question is, are those less-capable pilots creating more danger than is justified by the savings people get flying?
Remember, driving is more dangerous than flying. So if we drive up the cost of flying, we will make more people drive, and therefore kill more people. So even if cheap pilots means an airplane crashes once in a while, killing everybody, it could be better than raising ticket prices and getting that many people or more killed on the highways.
The local commuter guys don’t get paid enough in my professional opinion.
Or at least buy them a drink in the airport bar while you’re both waiting for the flight departure time.