When I was a young regional pilot in my early 20s, I scoffed at some of the mainline captains I met who seemed hopelessly out of touch with the realities of the modern aviation industry. Ah, the arrogance of youth. Now I’m the mainline captain and occasionally surprised to discover an industry trend that has been years in the making without me ever noticing it. Recently, when in the normal flow of cockpit conversation I mention that I own a Stinson 108 and finishing up a hangar-apartment on a 2,400-foot grass strip, a large majority of my younger first officers (FOs) say they have never landed on anything other than pavement. This is rather shocking to me.
I expect this out of military aviators, at least those outside the C-130 and C-17 communities, but many saying this come from a civilian background. In many cases, these FOs note the schools they learned to fly at—and instructed at—prohibited off-pavement operations altogether, for both training and renting, as well as operations at runways less than 3,000 feet in length—and sometimes above a certain elevation. Now that I think about it, the last several FBOs from which I rented aircraft had those same restrictions.
