The US Congress passed the first officer qualification law and resulting minimum 1,500 flight-hour regulations in the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Extension Act of 2010 after four fatal crashes over six years. "But the SkyWest proposal will do just that by gutting the rule under which regional pilots - already among the most junior, least-experienced commercial aviators - gain entry to the national airline system," Ambrosi said. While 9,500 pilots qualified last year, the backfill was insufficient to keep up with demand, nor did it address the shortage of captains at the regional level.ĪLPA President Jason Ambrosi reminded Buttigieg of his repeated promises that first officer qualifications would not be weakened under this administration's watch. According to the Regional Airline Association (RAA), US mainline carriers hired around 13,000 pilots in 2022, most from their regional counterparts. The crisis was caused by mainline carriers having headhunted those in the left-hand seat as travel rebounded after the pandemic, themselves having granted early retirement to pilots to cut costs during Covid-19. The plan is SkyWest's answer to a crippling shortage of experienced captains amongst regional carriers in the US. SkyWest already holds Part 135 authority but has applied for commuter air carrier authority. The aircraft are to be retrofitted with 30 seats, which means they will fall under FAR Part 135 regulations with lower pilot hour requirements - just 500 hours compared to the mandatory 1,500 hours for Part 121 scheduled operations. The background to the dispute is that the regional capacity provider plans to migrate around twenty CRJ200s to its new charter subsidiary. He reiterated that SWC "more than satisfies the statutory and regulatory requirements applied by the Department in determining an air carrier's fitness under applicable law". Responding in a separate letter to Buttigieg on April 27, SkyWest President and CEO Russel "Chip" Childs rejected ALPA's concerns as "thinly veiled attempts under the cloak of safety" to bar market entry by SWC, "a well-capitalised, exceptionally well-equipped, non-ALPA operator". "The airline seeks to shift its flying under Part 121's safety regulations to its own surrogate that will operate the same aircraft but under public charter rules and Part 135's safety regulations, with fewer seats and less experienced and qualified first officers." It accused SkyWest of attempting to "roll back the clock and skirt aviation safety rules that have led to a 99.8% reduction in airline passenger fatalities in the United States". In the April 26 letter, the world's largest pilot union described SWC as an attempt by SkyWest to substitute Essential Air Service (EAS) flying with an "alter-ego charter subsidiary operating essentially as a scheduled operation, but at a lesser level of safety". SkyWest Airlines (OO, Salt Lake City) has dismissed as "baseless, inaccurate, and misleading" concerns about its Part 135 charter subsidiary SkyWest Charter (SWC) expressed by the Air Line Pilots Association International (ALPA) in a letter to US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
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