With all due respect, I believe your biases are getting in the way of your common sense. A larger number of European airlines including British Airways, Sabena, Lufthansa, and KLM get their pilots from schools almost exactly like the MPD program. Their pilots start with zero hours and a year later they're in the right seat of 737's and 747's. Their safety record is no worse than ours here. Your problems with Mesa's program is that you (and I) had to work several years before we were hired by FAR 121 airlines flying RJ's or the equivalent. You probably have a problem that these guys and girls didn't have to take the same route as you. The truth is, it's probably no more unsafe to fly Mesa than any other airline that hires much higher time pilots. Let's face it, they fly with a captain and the captain most likely has at least 1,000 hours in the aircraft. Perhaps not a whole lot of time, but enough to stay out of trouble. I happily don't work for Mesa, but I'm certainly not going to refuse to fly them for such a bigoted and unvalid reason. Check your head to see if you're being biased because you're jealous that you had to work harder to get to the same spot. I think you may find that your really don't have a problem with ab initio airline pilot training.
Hopefully they'll score a respectable contract in the future and some other regional will become everyone's whipping-post.
