Plastic Pilot

A friend of mine told me he got slightly scared because he’s been welcomed on an airliner by a co-pilot looking like a teenager. I’m personally quite bad at guessing how old someone is, but I know the pilot’s licences rules quite well. I can promise that no teenager will ever act as an airline captain, the minimum age is 21.

No need to go deep in details of the rules here - there are more than 180 pages of legal documentation about this. Anyway experience is what counts, not age, so let’s see what practical experience is required being given a job in the right-seat of an airliner.

The first step is to get a private pilot license. This requires about 50 hours of flight. Then comes the multi-engine training, about 15 hours. At the same time, the training for instrument flying, 50 more hours - 40 of them can be in simulator.

A course for working in a multi-person crew environment is required, and then specific training for the type of aircraft to be flown. This is also mostly done in simulator. So yes, it is possible that your co-pilot has less than 200 hours of flight behind him. Is that safe ? Let’s see…

At first, young co-pilots to be start to fly as observers, with a crew of two. This allow for more familiarization with actual cockpit environment, and to have a first look at airports they will fly to.

After that comes the first flights as co-pilot. This is always under the supervision of so-called “training captains” which act as captain and instructor. Training captains have extensive experience, they hold instructor ratings, and coach the young co-pilots until they are experienced enough to fly with any captain.

Airlines also try to balance experience in a crew. Young co-pilots will fly with experienced captains, and when a co-pilot is promoted to captain, he flies with experienced co-pilots. The same thing happen when a captain is promoted to a different (usually larger) type of aircraft: he becomes a co-pilot again, flying with a captain experiences on the larger aircraft. This is what seniority system is about, but this is another story…

Given how regulated the training organisations are, I see no issue flying with a young co-pilot, nor a young captain. It even can be that a very young co-pilot has a fresher training on some aspicts than his captain, simply because he just came out of school.

Accident reports are full of stories about crews with various experience levels… The captain of a Jubolino that crashed in Zuerich years ago made critical mistakes that contributed to the accident. His total flight time was very close to 20′000 hours. He ignored important remarks from his co-pilot, whose flight time was about… 400 hours.

One can then argue about how and when the co-pilot made his remarks, but the result is here: the plane crashed on final approach - crew-collaboration breakdown is a factor.

As a final word, I can say that I don’t fear to fly with a young co-pilot, but rather to fly with a crew that can’t act as a team !