Is Total Flight Time the Best Way to Measure Pilot Competency?

We all know very well how important your total flight time is for career progression as a pilot. For decades, it has been (and still is) the primary gauge for companies and organisations to measure skill and experience.

But how effective is total flight time really to measure or predict a pilot’s competency? 💡

As aviation technology evolves, so does the industry, and so do the competencies and skills required to be a safe pilot. This has become more and more obvious now that operators are starting to use Evidence Based Training.

Some competencies that didn’t used to be focussed on at all, are now metrics that can predict effective CRM and TEM, such as emotional intelligence and realtime decision making.

So what does all of this mean? What is a good balance between total flight time, and other metrics to predict success and safety? You could have 10,000 hours of flight time doing operation X, but does that really make you better qualified for operation Y?

Let’s take a look! ⤵️

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Why is there Such a Focus on Total Flight Time?

There are several reasons why total flight time has become such a focus point across the aviation industry. We’ve identified the 6 biggest reasons that we’ll go into individually:

Flight Time is Easy to Quantify and Measure

If you have a requirement for anything, you’d better make sure it’s measurable! Well, flight time is probably one of the easiest things to quantify and measure. The industry has gone above and beyond to develop testing methods and selection criteria that are sort of measurable. However, a lot of them are still very subjective.

Leadership qualities, personality profiles, teamwork, hand eye coordination and many more. They’re all measurable, but there are always subjective or inaccurate variables within these methods. Flight time is something that’s (at least seemingly) black and white. Binary: you either hit the requirement, or you don’t.

This also makes promotions easier for companies. It gets rid of elbowing between coworkers. Once you have the hours (and / or years at the company), you become eligible for a promotion.

This is great for the airlines, where hours flown can easily be 800 hours per year. In the helicopter industry however, it can often only be 200-300 hours per year. Getting to 3000 hours in that environment won’t be a ‘few’ years. This makes promotions and internal career structures almost impossible.

Practical Experience is Vital in Aviation

No one can deny that practical experience is still vital for any pilot. No matter from which direction you look at it. Pilots with thousands of hours will have certain experiences in the back of their mind that they can lean and rely on when something similar happens again.

If you’ve gone through multiple real life emergencies, the ones that happen in the future that are even remotely similar can often feel much easier to deal with than the first time you encountered it.

Flight Time is Relatively Easy to Verify

Nope, it’s definitely not a perfect metric, and yes pilots can and do fake flight time. However, total flight time still is one of those things that can be easy to verify. You logbook’s flights will (or should) match the flights in an aircraft logbook that every company keeps track of.

If someone were to add hours out of thin air, it’s often quite easy to prove they’re full of shit – once you start digging! This has happened numerous times already, and will continue to happen. It’s the equivalent of faking your personality during an assessment. It usually doesn’t last very long before true behaviour shows.

Customer Confidence and Perception

Whether it’s accurate or not: experience and total flight time has a huge perceived correlation with competency as a pilot. Yes, there are always exceptions to the rule, but experience in pilots does instil trust in companies and especially the public. This is an often overlooked part of the equation. Without any of those 2, no one’s entering any flight deck!

Being able to say ‘all of our pilots have at least X amount of hours before getting through the door’ might not convince everyone that therefore everyone is competent, but it definitely convinces the general public, and therefore your potential passengers.

Historical Standards

And then there’s the good old ‘this is how we’ve always done it’. While there are usually good reasons for SOP’s, cultural standards and policies, it doesn’t mean that it’s a perfect measure, or that it perfectly predicts flight safety.

It’s part of a bigger picture to define and predict pilot competency, which is what we’ll discuss more below.

Insurances and Flight Time as a Risk Management Tool

Insurance companies and even clients of aviation operators have a massive say on minimum flight time requirements as well. These are often organisations with very little aviation expertise, so they go with what they deem are easy to understand predictors for flight safety: total flight time.

For example, in the offshore helicopter industry it is often the clients of the operators (Shell, BP, etc) that set the requirements, NOT the operators (although the minimum requirement is still set by the regulator).

Imagine your airline’s captaincy requirements being based on the opinion of the passengers instead of the airline’s own policies, SOP’s, and local regulations.

The Pros and Cons of the 1500 Hour FAA Rule

For the non-USA based readers here, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) introduced a new minimum hour rule after the Colgan Air Flight 3407 accident in 2009. The rule changed the minimum hours to obtain an Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) Certificate from 250 to 1500, which is a requirement to join the airlines in the USA.

This has been a somewhat controversial topic within the airline industry. It has numerous implications, as well as pros and cons, and is a perfect example of flight hours being directly linked to ‘pilot competency’’. So the question is, again:

Does increasing the total flight time requirement to join the airlines really directly improve the level of flight safety? Let’s go over the positives and the negatives of this.

Pros

So what is increasing the amount of hours for ATP pilots good for? Here are the main points:

1) A Standardised Benchmark

Implementing an hour-based rule like this helps set the standard across the industry. Airlines can’t deviate from this rule. This means you won’t have airline A requiring X amount of hours, and airline B requiring Y amount of hours.

2) Exposure to Diverse Flying Experiences

The 1500 hour rule gives the route to joining the airlines more variety. The plan for any USA-based aspiring pilot: get through basic training, then get about 1250 additional hours to get the ATP in whichever way you find the most interesting, rewarding, or useful.

Compared to Europe for instance, this gives cadets a much wider set of experiences compared to CPL – IR – MCC – JOC – Typerating – Joining the airlines.

3) Experience to Lean on

That increased variety in flight experience, as well as sheer amount of it compared to new pilots in Europe or other parts of the world, can provide something to lean on when things get tricky.

Experience that you wouldn’t have had if you went straight from an integrated training course, to flying as a regional first officer. This is the most given reason as to why the 1500 rule increases flight safety.

4) Cultural Integration

Many new pilots often decide to use the need to build about 1250 hours to get experience in multiple parts of the world, in lots of different types of operations.

Even if you were to go the flight instructing route (which is still the most common one), you’ll have to deal with lots of different people from all over the world. This is a huge benefit for any pilot, which we’ll cover more in the future.

5) Public Confidence

As a passenger, a member of congress, or a politician, who might not know anything about aviation, it sounds like a pretty good deal. What would you rather have:

A) Have pilots in the cockpit with at least 1500 hours?
B) Have pilots in the cockpit with at least 250 hours?

This is something that’s hard to dispute, and is also why it’ll be hard to ever remove this requirement, as there will likely strong public backlash.

Cons

So what is the bad side of the 1500 hour rule?

1) Skill Misalignment

The question is, does that extra non-airline experience really add to the levels of flight safety in an airline operation? If you’re an expert (and experienced) in bush flying, does that make you a safer first officer than someone who has been trained specifically to enter an airline flight deck at 250 hours?

In Europe, and many other parts of the world, cadets go through airline specific training. Some training is so specialised that it’s focussed on multi-crew operations ONLY. Now, whether that’s a good idea or not is for another article.

The point is, we are trying to figure out what is better: specially tailored training where you enter the flight deck after 250 airline-tailored hours (i.e Europe) vs much more experience that includes various types of operations (i.e the USA).

2) Financial Barriers

It isn’t a secret that starting your flight training, whether for helicopters of fixed wing, can be very costly. This problem is made a little easier with integrated schools in Europe who often have partnerships with banks and airlines who are willing to be the guarantors, provided students pass their intake selection process.

The involvement of banks and airlines obviously come with a lot of downsides, but it does open the door to a lot more differerent people than if you were to do everything by yourself.

It’s harder for airlines to get involved from the start, if students are not able to join them directly after training. This is an implication that creates an entirely different system for student pilots to deal with.

3) Delays in Career Entry

The pilot supply pipeline in Europe is extremely efficient. Airlines are often part of flight school selection processes, and get a say in who should and should not get placements.

This makes the career of European airline pilots much more straightforward compared to students in the USA. After flight school in Europe, it won’t be long until you’re on the flight deck, sometimes straight into long haul flying as a second officer, like at KLM and many others.

In the USA, you’ll need to bridge that gap from 250 hours to 1500 hours by yourself. That means freedom, but it can also mean jumping in the deep, moving countries, and less job security.

4) Pilots Forming Bad Habits

That block of 1250 hours can offer a wide selection of experiences. This unfortunately tends to come with bad habits as well.

For both rotary and fixed wing multi-crew operators in the United Kingdom for instance, they often prefer pilots straight out of flight school. This allows them to train their habits, flying techniques, and CRM in the way they want from the start.

Having someone join your company with a wealth of experience offers benefits. However, for pilots who need to get used to flying bigger airplanes or helicopters, this can present a lot of issues compared to brand new graduates.

5) Inhibits Diversity

For similar reasons to the ones we discussed in point 2: Airlines, operators and banks have an easier time to facilitate career paths if pilots can get hired straight out of flight school. This in turn makes the entire career path much more accessible to lots of different demographs that otherwise might not have had the opportunity or financial means to become a pilot.

Being able to just fork out $100,000+ and then go on an (often poorly paid) adventure to bridge the gap to 1500 hours, is a wildly different career path than the prospect of getting hired by an airline straight out of flight school. This can keep women for example, who tend to have more risk averse personalities (in general), from the industry. Who would otherwise might have made great pilots.

What Can be Used to Predict Pilot Competency?

So what’s the solution here? Well, as you probably already know – there’s no ‘solution’ quite yet. The fact is that none of the skills we’re going to list here are as easy to measure as simply looking in someone logbook and assuming it’s all 100% accurate and relevant to the position on the table.

However, especially for the helicopter industry where different operations vary massively compared to different types of airlines as an airline pilot: Flight time shouldn’t be the only metric to determine a pilot’s competency and eligibility for a position. It unfortunately requires time to assess properly, which is the main downside of NOT simply listing a total flight time requirement.

Until we find a way to quantify these in more obvious and objective ways, it will be hard to change anything. It is still very common that pilot X with less hours than pilot Y could be much better for the job, but doesn’t get the position or promotion.

If we zoom in on what makes a good pilot, these are the main traits that are linked to pilot competence:

So only experience is covered by looking at someone’s logbook. Someone could be massively experienced, and while that ticks one box, what about the other 8?

For now, these are not easy to put as an objective ‘number’ on your CV. You can’t say “my flight path management skills are 8/10”. You’ll probably raise a lot of eyebrows if you do put that on your CV. What does 8 mean, what does the 10 mean? It’s undefined and super subjective.

To test and quantify these properly, the most effective methods will remain:

Resources

Study on Competency Based Assessments for Pilots

Pilot Training and Competency by the Flight Safety Foundation

Research on Automated Objective Performance Metrics to Assess Pilots

Conclusion

Total flight time has been the main metric for pilot competency for decades now. However, as aviation evolves, it might not be as accurate as various other aspects that make a pilot competent or incompetent.

Total flight time remains easy to quantify and has a long established history of what is considered ‘good enough to be applicable’, it by itself is quite limiting in what it can predict.

The 1500-hour FAA rule highlights this ongoing debate, with pros like having a standardised benchmark for positions and promotinons, but some complex downsides that might not be obvious at first glance.

A more holistic approach to pilot assessment that incorporates scenario-based assessments, flight simulator evaluations, and personality assessments alongside just looking in a pilot’s logbook could prove to be well worth overall flight safety across the industry!

We don’t publish all our Notes from the Cockpit (like this one) publicly, some are shared only by email. Get the next one sent straight to your inbox ⤵️