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Comment by pixelfarmer | Hacker News Reader

It was pressure from airlines to not have to retrain pilots, because that costs them money and whatnot. And in almost all cases when it comes to Boeing, the 737, and further issues, these airlines are also involved.

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At this stage of the game, I seriously have to ask: is retaining the type rating actually a money-saver for the carriers?

I mean, airlines obtain new types all the time and pilots get trained to fly them. If it were so onerous, selling new aircraft would be practically impossible. (Yes, I know many Airbus share a type classification.)

It feels like there's an historical truth that's now no longer the case, especially when you consider all the associated compromises and, now, the resulting safety & engineering concerns.

Yes. Generally speaking, you want your pilots as proficient as possible on a single type. They will need many hundreds of hours on the new type before they are considered seasoned. A lot of disasters in the last 30 years have been amplified by pilots with low hours on the type they were flying. It takes a lot of training to memorize checklists, switches, levers, time to get muscle memory for various emergency situations. It’s a lot of time in the simulators. Lots of airlines also fly only one type, so they are majorly impacted by needing training for their entire pilot crew. It’s their own fault for choosing that but still. Combine this with the fact that airlines are razor thin margins and always seem a couple bad quarters away from bankruptcy and you get what we have today.

That's what everyone says, but I don't think the numbers are there. And, to be frank, most of the accidents you infer, are with non-US pilots, who's culture & training just doesn't match up with what the States has (hey, we invented the airplane).

[disclaimer: former chief dispatcher for a large regional US airline]

The problem isn't in retraining a pilot to fly the new plane. The problem is that this pilot is now no longer interchangeable with legacy 737 pilots, and cannot fly a legacy 737.

This means that if you have a hardware issue, you can't swap the plane without also swapping the flight crew.

There is a thing called equipment change. We use it all the time. At airline scale a captain (and crew) is worth an airplane. (And, come to think about it, it's a 1:1 relationship, so that follows Noether's Lemma, I think).

Don't overvalue the airship in the equation. (And I've done this job. I know what levers we can pull and how often it comes up.) Show me your data.

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