When you fly a Lear 20 series Lear you are low on fuel before you even start up. The objective is to land with as much fuel as possible and get the job done. Once you get below 800 lbs it was considered prudent to shut one engine down and transfer the fuel to one tank and land on one. If you had to go around you had plenty of fuel for the one engine. With the advent of fan engines and the twenty series Lear going away all those little tricks aren't needed anymore.
Take the commuter pilot and throw him in that enviroment and he will think we are crazy. Take the Lear Pilot and throw him in the commuter/regional enviorment and he will kill himself and a bunch of people. As a pilot we usually adapt to whatever it takes to complete the task within a safety envelope. Air America pilots operated in X places out of Laos, Cambodia, and other X places, they did crazy things but lost very few pilots due to pilot error/judgement. Hence airlines have produced SOP's to try and standardize the standard. One thing I hate is when pilots start spewing out FAR's, that is BS. FAR's have nothing to do with safety, they are a minimum standard there to protect the US Government from liability. Good procedures and manuals and pilot standardization have everything to do with safety and are very important.So there is nothing wrong with a commuter/regional pilot, when they think of landing they think about the 50 miles of being jacked around at ATL. When a Lear pilot thinks of landing they think about leaving 410 82 miles from destination and not touching the thrust for spoolup until 500 feet BTW that take 300lbs of fuel. Big diffrence. I am an advocate of lot's of fuel and even my airline complains that sometimes I land with too much. I have 173 people behind me, who cares, these beast don't run on air.
We were between cloud layers at one point and were passed by cars below on a 65mph highway.
