There's always a competency shortage in this kind of aviation because the crew are inexperienced people trying to get a higher rating and a better job. The big transport aircraft are so easy to fly now, they should probably switch the rules. They can let some kid fly second seat in a 737, but only crack veterans should be allowed to touch a King Air in the dark.
In Europe the problem is already pretty solved because you can get a MPL and fly right seat in a passenger jet in 245 flight hours, just by going through an airline cadet program or something like that.
If I'm not mistaken the US still has the 1500 hour requirement that was illogical even when it was first introduced. It was introduced as a response to a crash by poorly trained pilots, but both pilots in that crash had over 2000 hours each, so the lesson should clearly have been that a raw number of hours is a very poor indicator of competence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_transport_pilot_licenc...
> They can let some kid fly second seat in a 737, but only crack veterans should be allowed to touch a King Air in the dark.
This is similar to the conclusion from one of the blancolirio videos about this crash[1]:
> The operation that dispatched this flight should have never dispatched this flight in the first place to begin with. There are simply too many variables working against you to accept this flight. And in my opinion, this is another classic situation where we're losing a lot of young pilots just trying to build up flying time to that magic 1500 hours to get on to a better job and a better future with the airlines. In my opinion, we should have never implemented the 1500 hour rule. These kids would have been much better off if they had been hired by the airlines at 500 hours and been trained and kept in a safer, more controlled environment in the right seat of the airline that they're going to work for for the rest of their career while they build up their time there to get to 1500 hours, where they can then get their ATP rating and then upgrade to the left seat; instead of sending all of our young pilots out there to do all kinds of risky flying operations in an effort to build up the magical 1500 hours as required by a knee-jerk reaction by Congress to assuage the family members of the Colgan Air crash victims. Get rid of the 1500-hour rule.
1. https://youtu.be/Dcyup4xVQuM?t=977