K Edwards

Airlines: Lowering the Standard Is Never the Best Choice

Interesting perspective, but you have it wrong and by attaching the tickers of US Airways, American and United to your article you have unjustly accused them. As a commercial airline pilot for a major US carrier with 21 years of military and commercial flying experience, I can speak with some authority on this subject. A major airline like those you so wrongly accused by will NEVER hire a pilot with 500 hours. These pilots are being hired by small feeder airlines or subsidiaries of the major airline. These newly minted pilots will be flying aircraft like the Beech 1900 or a small regional jet (somewhere between 19-50 seats), not a DC-10 as you stated. Besides, almost no one in the US passenger market operates the DC-10 anymore. It's been primarily relegated to 3rd world or cargo airlines.
Additionally, just because a pilot is hired by an airline doesn't mean that it's a slam dunk. It's usually 2-3 months of ground school, intensive simulator training and an FAA check ride before the new pilot even sits behind the controls of one of these small airliners. And even then it's more training in the aircraft under the tutelage of an instructor called a Check Airman before the new pilot gets to "fly the line".
While I admit, everyone inside and out of the industry would like to see more experience, a situation like what we see now has been used many times before as the number of available pilots has dried up. Many major US airlines once had "training academies" to help add pilots to an expanding roster. Many major non-US airlines still use this method to acquire pilots that have almost no flight experience at all where the general aviation or military flight training programs are not very robust.
You made a reference to heart surgeons and the experience levels needed to safely perform those duties. But every heart surgeon had a "first time" and required plenty of surgeries under the guidance of a more experienced surgeon during residency. You can look at the fact that these young men and women will be flying as co-pilots, not Captains, gaining valuable experience and thousands of hours of experience before being checked out as a Captain (which by also requires a separate, intensive training evolution regardless of experience) with their own aircraft and crew.
While it's certainly not a perfect system, there are many checks and balances in place to ensure safety in our air travel system, especially when it comes to training and qualifications of pilots, so please don't make a conclusion based and publish something based on one Wall Street Journal article.