This is the third of four parts.

Paul Onorato’s pilot training occurred up in the skies, where he learned how to recover from dangerous stalls and handle high G-force pressures while pulling out of a spin or righting a plane that suddenly flipped on its side and then upsidedown. He learned with no passengers in sight.

The first time Marvin Renslow ever tried recovering from such intense, in-flight airplane upsets?

From all the evidence so far, it came Feb. 12, in an emergency and with a planeload of trusting passengers aboard Continental Connection Flight 3407, on a night that neither he nor 49 others would survive.

While the commercial airline skies once were filled with the likes of Onorato – former military pilots known for their aviation skills, command experience and emergency reactions – that no longer is the case. Instead, they are being replaced by civilian pilots who come from training backgrounds that vary greatly in quality of what is taught and learned.

The differences can be stark. Onorato, with advanced military training that can cost $5 million or more, was a Top Gun combat pilot for the Navy, which routinely washes out under-performers who can’t make it through the rigors of military flight instruction.

Renslow became a regional airline pilot after studying at

Gulfstream Training Academy, which boasts: “Become a pilot for a regional airline in 90 days.” It is one of dozens around the country derided by some veterans as “pilot mills” for their hurried-up instruction.

Aviation experts said that in the future, the American flying public can expect fewer pilots trained like Onorato – and more trained like Renslow, whose mistakes are believed to be key to the crash of Flight 3407.

Fueling their concerns is a rebound in the national economy, which has become a barometer for pilot hiring standards by some airlines.

At the time of his hiring in 2005, Renslow had just 625 hours of “flying experience,” much of it for Gulfstream’s own small airline.

His hiring at Colgan, the regional airline that ran the flight for Continental, came amid the beginnings of a pilot shortage so deep that regional airlines were hiring people with only 250 hours in the cockpit, the minimum allowed by law. With some exceptions, that’s the same number of hours needed for a license to fly banners up and down a beach or to be a crop duster.

But in the past two years, soaring fuel prices and the sinking economy have hammered the airline industry, resulting in thousands of pilot layoffs. Airlines responded by raising employment standards to the point where Colgan earlier this month told pilots at a job fair in Queens that it now prefers pilots with a minimum of 1,500 hours’ experience.

Now, though, safety experts and pilots are worried about what is coming, as the economy improves and airlines start hiring again this spring.

“Hiring standards go up and down radically,” said a former federal crash investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “During periods of rapid expansion, standards are diminished.”

That’s bad news for the flying public, according to aviation pros, who worry some beginner pilots fresh from flight schools lack the skills needed to handle a midair emergency.

“They are neophytes building experience with people’s lives at stake,” said Onorato, a commercial pilot who heads the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations.

Many Top Guns

Two decades ago, the newly hired men and women behind the cockpit doors of America’s commercial planes were rarely neophytes.

Many were Top Guns.

About 90 percent of newly hired pilots in 1992 had military backgrounds, according to FltOps.com and KitDarby.com Aviation Consulting, two firms that track hiring in the industry.

By last year, that figure had plummeted to about 30 percent.

It’s a change driven by the falling fortunes of the major air carriers. When Onorato left the military for an airline job in 1996, the airlines were luring pilots away with annual salary offers of $200,000 or more.

Now, after a decade of deep financial losses at the major airlines, Onorato said he knows some former military pilots whose airline salaries were sliced to $100,000. Others refuse to leave the military for a lower-paying job at a regional airline – or even a major carrier.

“So why come out of the military when you are flying a $40 million fighter, fighting terrorism and making $140,000 a year to join a no-growth industry flying weekends and holidays and making $60,000 in the right seat?” Onorato said, referring to the starting first officer’s salary at major airlines.

That rationale, multiplied by the thousands, has changed the calculus of airline hiring. Major airlines now hire many of their pilots from regionals, the commuter outfits that handle the less lucrative routes under the name of the big carriers. And pilots say the regionals spend $50,000 or less training their pilots.

In other words, the regionals serve as a “farm system” for the majors, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

“If regional carriers understand that their pilots are only working for a short time, or a number of them are, what incentives do the regional carriers have to invest in these pilots and provide them with anything more than the bare minimum training?” she asked at a recent Senate hearing.

Some in the airline industry say the reputation of military training can be overblown and that privately trained pilots can be just as good aviators as their military-trained counterparts.

“The kind of skills you get flying into bad weather into Buffalo you don’t necessarily get flying in a fighter plane,” said a seasoned commercial pilot who works for a major airline and did not come from the military.

But most agree training in civilian schools just isn’t as intense.

"Their standards are lot higher," acknowledged a pilot who trains other pilots at a regional airline. "When you get turned real hard or there's bad turbulence or you get flipped on your side, it's very frightening. But military guys are more comfortable with that."

A top training facility agrees.

"The significance is military pilots are highly trained in maximum performance flying, aviation physiology and recovery from upset conditions, while commercially trained pilots are not," the National AeroSpace Training and Research Center recently said in commenting on a federal plan to improve pilot training.

“The Navy washed out plenty of smart, talented pilots who just could not grasp the syllabus fast enough,” said Onorato, who flew combat missions in F-14 Tomcat fighters off the deck of the USS America in the first Gulf War.

That’s not so with the civilian flight schools, where there’s more of a “pay to stay” culture, aviation sources said.

“There they typically learn to do it on the basis of MasterCard,” said Kit Darby, the industry consultant.

What’s more, most such flight schools are located in the Sun Belt, far from the winter winds and icy conditions that pilots may encounter when flying for a regional airline.

“Florida is known for its unmatched pilot-training environment, with over 360 days a year of good flying weather,” boasts Phoenix East Aviation, a Daytona Beach-based flight school, on its Web site.

The director of the flight school Renslow attended, Gulfstream Training Academy in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., disputed the notion that all flight schools offer hurry-up, second-rate training.

In fact, pilots frequently flunk out of Gulfstream for failing to perform well on pilot proficiency tests, said James R. Bystrom, director of Gulfstream.

In addition, Bystrom stressed that Gulfstream only trains pilots for its own airline, a regional that flies between Florida and the Bahamas. Gulfstream also handles Continental Connection flights serving Jamestown and Bradford, Pa.

While Gulfstream’s advertising says “become a pilot for a regional airline in 90 days,” Bystrom stressed that those who enter the Gulfstream Academy must have piloting experience and ratings from the Federal Aviation Administration.

“It’s not an aviation school where people are taught to fly,” said Bruce Hicks, a Gulfstream spokesman.

And while Gulfstream has been in the spotlight because Renslow went there, Hicks pointed out that Renslow got 82 percent of his flying experience at Colgan and only 7 percent at Gulfstream. He termed Renslow’s attendance at Gulfstream “an irrelevant factoid.”

But there’s nothing irrelevant about the fact that many pilots now get their basic training at private flight schools rather than the military, said Mark Rosenker, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.

“As long as you have a checkbook with money, they’re going to keep you in the program in these civilian flight schools, so maybe some people get into the business who really just passed through by the skin of their teeth and don’t have a knack for it,” said Rosenker, who retired from the Air Force as a major general although he is not a pilot.

Industry needed pilots

Pilot hiring standards “vary depending on how badly the airlines need the pilots,” said Janeen Kochan, a pilot and certified FAA pilot examiner who studies the human factors involved in pilot performance.

The industry – especially the regional carriers – needed pilots badly only two years ago. Some of those new pilots clearly were not ready to fly, Darby said, noting that at some airlines, nearly 50 percent of the new hires failed their flight tests.

That’s because the training system at individual airlines “was never really designed to hire people at that level,” he added.

But the airlines felt they had no choice.

“The system was flat-out running out of pilots,” Darby said.

One of the pilots hired in the boom times was Renslow. He joined Colgan Air in 2005 with just 625 hours of flight time under his belt.

“That’s not much for, uh, back when you got hired,” the co-pilot of Flight 3407, Rebecca Shaw, told Renslow shortly before the plane crashed.

Colgan officials insist the airline was not among the regionals that were hiring pilots with fewer than 300 hours a couple of years ago.

Joe Williams, a spokesman at Pinnacle Airlines Corp., the parent company of Colgan, said he could only find one instance of a pilot who cleared the interview process during 2006 or 2007 with fewer than 300 hours’ experience, and he could not confirm whether the pilot ended up flying for the airline.

Asked why Colgan had bumped its preferred minimum hours to 1,500, Williams said the minimum is still 1,000 hours but that 1,500 hours are likely, given the number of pilots looking for jobs. He said the most recent class of pilots hired averaged 1,800 hours.

“Flight hours are not the best proxy for competence and skill in the airline environment,” Williams said, adding that all Colgan pilots must complete an “intense” training program that complies with FAA standards.

Renslow’s hiring was part of a chain reaction driven by the retirements of older pilots at the major carriers, which then set off a wave of hiring as pilots with regional airlines moved up to help fill the seats at the majors.

Affected most by pilot shortages are regional airlines -- which feed not only passengers to the major carriers but also supply them with a steady stream of pilots eager for the bigger paychecks and other benefits that traditionally have come with the legacy carriers. As captains move from the regionals to the majors, the regionals then scramble to move first officers into the vacated captains' seats while at the same time scramble to hire new first officers.

Concerns about the pilot shortage were so deep by 2007 that Congress approved the Fair Treatment of Experienced Pilots Act, which raised the mandatory retirement age for airline pilots from 60 to 65. At the time, 50 airline pilots a week were retiring, congressional records show, airline traffic was growing steadily and regional airlines feared they would have to pare their schedules if they couldn’t find more pilots.

But then everything changed for the airline industry.

Rising fuel prices in 2008 and a depressed economy slammed the airlines especially hard, and thousands of pilots found themselves getting furloughed.

That created a glut of 6,000 experienced but jobless pilots, allowing airlines to cherry-pick. And in turn, airlines started demanding far more flying experience than they sought only two years earlier.

“The hiring slowdown saved the industry from a complete meltdown,” said Louis Smith, a retired airline pilot who runs FltOps.com, an Alabama-based professional pilot career advisory firm.

At a recent pilots job fair at a hotel across the street from LaGuardia Airport in New York, the head of pilot recruitment for Colgan Air told potential applicants the airline now wants new pilots to have a minimum of 1,500 hours experience in the cockpit – a large increase from just two years ago, according to company pilots.

These tougher requirements are possible at a time when major airlines hired just 30 new pilots this year, and all of those were by Jet Blue. That’s down from 2,800 hires in 2007, according to Smith.

“It’s the worst year for pilot hiring in recorded history,” Smith told a packed room of job-hunting pilots at that job fair in New York.

Signs of rising demand

Now, though, aviation experts wonder if the pilot shortage of two years ago is about to return. There already are signs that the demand for pilots is increasing.

Foreign airlines are hiring and domestic major carriers are making hiring plans. American Eagle this month recalled its 50 furloughed pilots, said Judy Tarver, vice president of pilot career services at FltOps.com, which notes half of the regionals are interviewing for pilot positions.

A pilot shortage would be the result of a smaller pool of civilian pilots -- decreasingly interested in joining a regional carrier for $20,000 a year while burdened with $100,000 or more in debt from their flight schools or colleges -- and fewer military pilots.

Smith noted that, following the Vietnam Warm, as many as 5,000 pilots a year were leaving the military for the airlines. Delta Air Lines one year tapped military pilots for 98 percent of its hires.

Today, he said, about 4,500 pilots are expected to leave the military during the next 12 years. Besides the military paying better than it once did, the overall number of military pilots had shrunk, in part because of a steady move to drones flown via computer.

In the 1970s, airlines wouldn't hire pilots over age 29, which further prodded pilots to leave the military. The hiring age was raised by many airlines to 40 or older, but the military countered with more years of commitment -- 10 years after flight school compared to up to five in the 1970s -- and better pay.

At that New York job fair, Sara Martinez, Colgan’s new pilot-recruiting director, said the airline plans to hire about 150 new first officers, or co-pilots, in May.

And Smith’s firm, which tracks pilot hiring, noted recently that half of the regional airlines were interviewing pilot candidates.

“Based on historical cycles, it’s definitely bottomed out,” Smith said of the decline in pilot hiring. “By the spring, we will see majors starting to rehire.”

At that point, it may not take long for a pilot glut to become a pilot shortage.

Even though there are 6,000 pilots on furlough today, “that’s only three or four months’ worth of pilots” if hiring rebounds to its pace of a few years ago, said Darby, the industry consultant.

“This shortage will develop very quickly,” he said.

"There's a crisis coming," said Smith, who is a retired Northwest Airlines pilot.

A couple years ago, Smith said, the situation got so bad that some regionals were looking at the prospect of having to curtail services to some cities. Only the recession prevented that.

Making matters worse will be the fact that the number of new pilots has dropped in recent years. In 2000, the FAA issued 7,700 new Airline Transport Pilot licenses, which are required for captains on commercial airlines.

Last year, that number dropped to 5,200.

While the number of pilots decreases, the Federal Aviation Administration expects a long-term increase in U. S. air travel, from 769 million passengers in 2007 to more than 1 billion by 2021.

“Simply put, in the next five to 10 years there are more airplanes being produced worldwide than there will be pilots to fly them,” ATP Flight Schools, which offers a “150 Day Fast Track” program to become a commercial pilot, said on its Web site. “There will always be ample opportunities for our graduates to translate their training into careers in the shortest time possible.”

It all prompts many aviation pros to wonder if the industry will return to hiring less-experienced pilots.

At a House of Representatives aviation subcommittee hearing in September, Jeffrey Skiles, the co-pilot in the US Airways plane that landed safely on the Hudson River this year, said airlines had previously sacrificed “experience for the bottom line.”

For example, Shaw, the 24-year-old co-pilot of Flight 3407, earned only about $16,000 a year.

Skiles said low wages –which air-lines can insist on in this pilot glut period – are starting to have a major impact on the quality of pilots who fly the nation’s skies.

“Many of our nation’s experienced pilots are now unwilling to work in the industry for such wages, and regional airlines need to fill their pilot seats with lesser-qualified pilots,” Skiles said.

In an interview, Skiles said he attended a recent seminar where corporate executives told of being surprised about the experience levels of some regional airline pilots. Skiles said corporations would never let their CEOs fly with pilots with such little experience.

If history is a gauge, airlines will again lower hiring standards, which means pilots who do not have enough training are going to eventually end up ferrying passengers around the country.

But it’s also possible that airlines will think better of it in the wake of the crash of Flight 3407.

“I believe you’d be pretty delinquent if you aren’t considering how you’re doing business as a result of what’s happened,” said Capt. Chuck Hogeman, who is chairman of the Human Factors and Training Group at the Air Line Pilots Association, the nation’s largest pilot union.

"We're going to need more pilots," said a captain at a major airline. "What will the industry's response be? Will it be to lower the qualifications? That's not going to work out too well."

tprecious@buffnews.com ; jzremski@buffnews.comnull