It depends what you mean by “better pilot”:
- Someone who lives longer for the same mission? then, then fly the same type as long as you can
- Someone who lives longer on various missions? then, then fly as many types as you can
As someone mentioned before flying most certified aircraft is the same thing over and over, so mostly what you get with flying more hours is: having a relax attitude that keeps you ahead of the aircraft workflow while you fly inside what have been certified as envelope.
I flew different types for the fun you get, I don’t think they are that different in handling and I think most of us could have flown them on perfect days following a self brief from the AFM…However, I think many hours on various types will definitely make a good pilot for non-certified aircraft (e.g. experimental, in/out-envelope testing….)
If you ask insurers for their risk-based point of view, they will say 25h on type/model is sufficient for most certified aircraft while they will quote a 4 digit number on anything experimental…
Some pilots are better than others. The good ones fly lots of different planes, as well as different “missions”. The rest stick to one single plane and one single “mission”
Just for the sake of argument. Let’s transfer this to skiing. Obviously you won’t become a better skier by skiing the same slope over and over compared with another that ski all over the place, including off piste, cross country, water, down hill, slalom, in all kinds of weather. Why would this be different with planes?
Being capable of doing different “missions” does not make you a better pilot however. In fact it spreads your currency on type over different types and thus thins it out. It’s back to my post #01.
Skiing is a good analogy in that some of it is much more risky. All the people I recall who broke legs did it off-piste. Does that make them better skiers? I am sure all were very good skiers – way better than me – but I doubt they are good because they broke their leg(s), especially as the last one I know broker her leg avoiding some kid who was messing about in the snow… off piste too. I have seen loads of people skiing off piste and a lot of it is obviously incredibly dangerous, with deep holes with rocks at the bottom.
This leads directly to risk compensation. I try to make my flying safer by sticking to the one plane which I maintain to the highest standard possible. Would I be a better pilot if I occassionally jumped into some shagged spamcan? With ~2400hrs in the TB20 I am probably not learning anything new in it, but why should I thin out my currency on type while taking extra risks?
And then we get onto enjoyment / getting value out of one’s flying. I don’t see this is related to flying more than one type. If you get value flying a C150 for 40 years, that’s great. Especially in GA where the choice of hardware is really rather poor, with the options in the SEP sphere being rather poor (all of it shakes and rattles and tries to make you deaf), and the turboprop sphere is an order of magnitude increase in costs. A lot of people get into aerobatics and get value that way, too.
I think Ibra is right when he says
It depends what you mean by “better pilot”:
Obviously, for the best all round pilot, you need to fly as many hours as possible in as many different types as possible, on as many different missions as possible, in as many different weather conditions as possible and in as many different terrains/hostilities as possible.
But for most of us, time, money, location and access to aircraft put limits on this and such variety simply isn’t possible.
For most of us wishing to improve, the answer is simply to fly as often as possible, trying to vary what we are doing so that we don’t keep doing the same thing. Whether we change the aircraft or the mission doesn’t really matter; we’re just improving a certain aspect of our flying. Which one doesn’t matter, as we don’t have the resources to do both.
Currency is king for most of us.
To maximize happiness with limited resources, you need to explore a bit especially on early stages and then you should settle down forever (the trade-off between exploration and exploitation applies to other things in life not just aircraft)
This is the same as finding and milking a lucky slot machine of the casino (if such thing exist), for those who likes the maths behind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
Peter wrote:
Would I be a better pilot if I occassionally jumped into some shagged spamcan? With ~2400hrs in the TB20 I am probably not learning anything new in it, but why should I thin out my currency on type while taking extra risks?
As the only saying goes, no risk means no reward although obviously flying “shagged” aircraft would not be the best choice of risk in relation to learning something new. On the other hand, if somebody were to confine their flying to test flights on one of kind homebuilts, they’d take more than their fair share of risks to gain useful experience. I think the issue is management of risk exposure and choice to achieve the maximum benefit, and not going too far in either direction. I’m not a big risk taker generally, but I have done things over time that others think are a bit risky, and have so far been fairly successful in avoiding injury and accidents. I hope that pattern continues in everything I do…
In relation to aircraft types from which one can learn, it seems to me that if you’re flying something like a TB20, you’re not going to learn much from flying Cessna or Piper rental planes. However in relation to the phrase ‘spam can’ and its connotations, a TB20 is a spam can. Exposure to tailwheel or aerobatic aircraft that are not ‘spam cans’ is I believe useful if benefiting from wider experience is actually a personal goal. Those aircraft have typically have more effective controls and require that you use them, as result of less technology (e.g, no flaps) lower stability in some phases of operation (e.g. takeoff and landing) and/or the way they intended to be flown (e.g. short field operations, maneuvering flight, and potentially aerobatics). It does not make them better aircraft than ‘spam cans’ but it does make them aircraft from which you can learn.
Ibra wrote:
milking a lucky slot machine
With machines government-mandated to fixed odds, apparently you watch the machine and wait while other people lose x times because it must win every y plays.
Most people get a real job :)
Sometimes I really think pilot forums come up with theories worse than any CAA can think of…. thousands of hours to know a Cessna 172? I do hope not indeed, otherwise how can we do a PPL in 50 hours? I would think it doesn’t even take that much to know what you need to know about an A320.
It is really funny. After the JU crash we had, there were screamers in our Swiss forum who declared that any airline pilot would be disqualified to fly a JU on principle, non withstanding that the crew in question had 1k and 300 hrs respectively on type and were also former military. Stuff like that is really what the beancounter brigade in the CAAs are waiting for… taking this to the extreme will more or less mean nobody is qualified for anything anymore, as flying is such a science, it can’t be mastered by poor mortals.
I call BS and I think it is typical for the European aviation scene that some people inside the industry are more extremist than the worst legal eagles within the caa’s.
But on the other hand, if I see the mess those two A380 skippers managed to do with that south african Convair…. maybe some of those screamers have a point after all.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Stuff like that is really what the beancounter brigade in the CAAs are waiting for
We are our own worst enemies I think the CAAs actually are considerably more sober and objective about stuff like this than a group of self serving “experts” like us. It all boils down to pure snobbery and elitism. You need an acro rating or 2000h or whatever to be “safe”, just nonsense of course, but it makes us feel good (important, better, special) saying it
Mooney_Driver wrote:
But on the other hand, if I see the mess those two A380 skippers managed to do with that south african Convair…. maybe some of those screamers have a point after all.
As a lifelong renter, I can tell you that the type of pilot the rental outfits fear most is – the senior airline captain. I definitely do not want to cast aspersions on the airline chaps we got on here, btw! Interestingly, the above statement is corroborated by some airline pilot friends of mine, who do not regularly fly GA.
