Absolutely true. But is the right hand seat of an A320 operating RPT the right place to be starting? Now obviously every pilot who gets to 5000+ hours must have started with 0 hours on each type on which they fly. But would be nice to know that even if the pilots have low hours on the specific type being flown, they have plenty of experience with other types and flying conditions before taking on commercial RPT jet ops.
The right hand seat of ANY airliner is not the place for an inexperienced. That first couple of thousand hours should come in GA, or the air force, but most definitely not anything carrying large numbers of passengers.
In many ways, there is little difference between something like an A380/747 and the smaller aircraft from the same maker. If a 380 can do it to you, so can a 320.
Yes, these kids are young, smart and keen. But, quite honestly they mostly fly the same way youngsters drive. Leap first, and look second. They load up very quickly, and when they do start to task shed, they are just as likely to shed the important stuff.
This entire exercise is driven by accountants, not by pilots. They know as little about flying, as I know about finance.
Yes, everyone starts with zero hours, but historically people have gained those hours on types on which there is less to lose when mistakes happen. And yes, there was a time when I was sitting in the left seat of a 380, with zero hours on type, but in that case I had a very senior captain sitting next to me, and also an FO and a SO looking over both of our shoulders. Their entire reason for being there was to make sure that the two captains did not become so involved in the training aspects that they forgot the flying ones. And, of course, whilst I had zero 380 hours, I had about 18,000 on other heavy types.
There is a myth around (believed by some here I think) which basically says that the modern 'electric' jets are so safe that the insurance policy provided by the pilots is less necessary. Well, firstly the electric jets are extremely prone to faults and errors. "What's it doing now" isn't a quote that means the pilots don't know what the aircraft is doing, but is just as likely to be applied when the aircraft takes it into its head to go off at a tangent. The electric jets, in particular the Airbus, also have a nasty habit of becoming much harder to operate after any sort of malfunction. They may be relatively easy to operate when things are going well, but a couple of random failures can do nice things like take ALL of the automatics away, whilst simultaneously dropping the aircraft into different (i.e. harder) flight control laws. This sort of stuff happens, but it normally never becomes an incident, and therefore you don't hear about it, because it is simply managed by the pilots.
The classic accident involving people who should not have been there is, of course, Colgan. Not only was the FO out of her depth, but the captain was pretty much incompetent. But, another accident that involved task saturation, but relatively much more experience people, was that of Turkish at Amsterdam. That should have been caught, but was basically missed because everyone's eyes were off the ball...but that is exactly the sort of risk you would be exposing yourself to with low total time pilots...and remember, we aren't talking about them being restricted to flying with training captains, nor will there be a 'safety' FO. These, basically unqualified, people would be the actual FOs. Quite honestly, at that point I would be driving my car, not setting foot on an aircraft.
Bear in mind that I am not saying that experienced people don't make mistakes. Sure they do. But generally they recognise them earlier, recover from them more gracefully, and then simply move on. Very simple to say, but it takes a lot of experience to learn just how to do it, and it cannot be learnt in a simulator or classroom.
