Originally Posted by Zard

I’ve been through both. I’ll feed the troll.

UPT - regimented groundschool. Multiple tests, passing grade is between 80-90% depending on the manpower requirements. Fail two and you go to a review board that might kick you out or remediate you and return you to training. Those two failures follow you, so if you fail a check ride down the road prior to winging, you’re right back at a review (elimination) board. You’re also going through in depth survival and physiological training that gets repeatedly refreshed over the course of your flying career.

80ish hours of primary flying. Multiple sorties most days as a student. Emergency procedures on every contact flight are practiced repeatedly. Students get multiple simulated engine out landings on every flight. Everything in the pocket checklist that we can simulate, we do, and the syllabus tracks and makes sure it’s not just an exposure item but that they get multiple looks at every EP. Formation flying. Full instrument procedures with 3-5 approaches per instrument hop. Each of these sections has at least one if not two jeopardy check rides. Fail it and you start down the elimination process which is two more flights.

More of the same in advanced training. No flap, single engine, compound complex EPS are your bread and butter, in the weather in the airplane. SIMs are more of the same. I was never as good of an instrument pilot in the 3500 hours since Advanced as I was leaving Corpus Christi after flying the C-12 around the Valley of the Downs. Lots of real world practice getting into and out of fields ranging from untowered all the way up to busy class B. Lot’s of ‘here’s what the book says, here’s how it works in real life.’ Tons of CRM taught, either inter-cockpit or inter-flight depending on which track one is on.

Tons of system knowledge required from my platform...remember, you may operate with your crew and a maintenance kit at a remote location and need to know what is safe and possible and what is not.

More of the same at the RAG or RTU, just in your actual platform now.

121 training: disjointed by comparison. Multiple days with no real rhyme or reason and multiple instructors at the training center who’d never actually flown the line for my company. Lots of FAA mandated stuff slopped together. The sims were excellent at training me to do more of the same EPs in the weather, but very little on what we actually do 99.99% of the time. Fast time to train, but looking at the material afterwards, it could have been way more efficient. The days are not densely packed and have way too much death by PowerPoint.

Both have positives and minuses. Proficiency develops more fully at the training command because there’s less of a demand signal in terms of cost and you obviously get tons of reps at everything. You are ‘qualified’ faster at a 121 training center because you aren’t worth a damn until you have that check ride complete.

Point A to Point B is an afterthought in the military. It’s just assumed you will know how to do it because we don’t have time to teach a winged aviator how to do all the admin stuff once they are at a squadron. They should know it the way the book says it so they are plug and play with every other nugget is a squadron.

Time is spent on tactics, upgrading, and accumulating qualifications, all while doing multiple ground jobs that increase in responsibility and leadership requirements. As a 25 year old, I lead a division of about 100 maintenance sailors, was a mission commander, and qualified as an instructor pilot in my platform. My experience is not unique, it’s just expected that you will figure out how to manage that. You develop resourcefulness and maturity, or you fail.

After about a year on the line, there’s no functional difference in a prior regional FO or a prior mil guy. Each airline has its own way of doing things, so other than being sharper at bidding and knowing some of the acronyms, unless someone has time in that airframe, there’s not much that a regional guy brings that a mil guy can’t learn just as quickly in training.

As far as why hiring likes mil guys the bell curve is much tighter and the standard deviation much smaller when you can look at a guys resume and see if he got the good jobs or the not so good jobs, if you know what you’re looking for. There’s just not that much room for someone who really really sucks to keep flying long enough to get to the stay or go point in the military. I’m sure bad apples snake through, but overwhelmingly, we are a known quantity (plus or minus a few quirks based on service and platform). Other than learning the automation and company specific CRM, the plane is still just a plane. 99% of what I do in this job was the part that was taken for granted in mil aviation. No one gave a **** how good an ILS you could shoot...all they cared about was the mission. What was important was how you dealt with everything else that can go sideways on a mission. Essentially, hiring people like us because we’ve already practiced for the .01% of the time things go poorly.

Anyone can go from point a to point b on the autopilot. It isn’t that hard.