acheo said:
and I know
a lot of flying college guys flying Hornets.....so we're even
Fair enough, but I have to ask, what's
"a lot"? Is there more flying college guys getting the 200 glory hours on the hornet than PPL guys/no PFE guys? Are you talking about 2, 3, 5, 15, 276? Contrast that to how many bottomed the course and ended up with their 3rd choice.
Its actually a really interesting beer-involved argument, does PFE of any type help? I'm sure someone somewhere has the stats floating around on their hard drive. It'd be easy to keep track of, just compare experience levels (licence/rating/hours/etc....) against course standings bell curved to represent a standard mix course (remove anomalies like a 90% PFE course from an entire no PFE course). It'd end arguments of the type of: "well, there was this guy on our course with a multi-IFR CPL from [insert flying college name here] and 1,000 hours flying a caravan and was pretty much a god, therefore multi-IFR CPL and 1,000 hours flying a caravan will find MJ a cakewalk" (or, of course, the vise-versa). Of course, people here will say you'd never see numbers like that since we like to sell the idea that there's no disadvantage to the no-PFE guy who's thinking of signing the dotted line.
When you shoot approaches in Chicago, Detroit, Toronto area everyday, the radar square in YMJ, Swift Current, Saskatoon are just basic stuff.
Umm....you did point to point radar squares at 180 kts single pilot with no autopilot in real or simulated IMC for an hour at a time in Chicago, Detroit, or Toronto, shooting different approaches each time? Neat trick. I wish I had that experience level when I got to MJ. I'll concede that PFE with IFR would help enormously, but only to a point. Shooting vectored approaches isn't all that hard, going around the square again trying to hit the corners while juggling the stick, throttle, radios, change pages in the flips, and brief the approach isn't something I'd guess the average CPL guy does daily.