Originally Posted by ctd57
It is real flying though. Tell anyone who has been there that it is not. It is the hardest type out there in my opinion. It applies in the way that you hear guys on here saying that unless you have thousands of hours, you have no real experience. Just because they have all of that time, doesn't mean that they are gods gift to aviation. I was just implying that they couldn't handle that type of flying, unless they had been there. You have to make decisions quicker than the airplane, and at 500'AGL, you don't have a lot of time. At FL240, you have a lot more time to think about it. I guess what I meant to say that flying up there is easy. I was just agruing that in the civilian world of flying, there really isn't much different between someone with 500 hours and 1000 hours as a flight instructor. It was just more laps in the pattern and more maneuvers. You reach a plateau as a flight instructor after so many hours of doing it. The new experiences will come once they move on to say 121 or 135 ops.
I think these programs are ok, think about it. They are getting good training and would you rather have some person next to you who came from a well structured program with good training who maybe has a little less hours, or some guy who has 2000 hours flying out of an uncontrolled field and has probably never been in class b airspace. I will take the low time guy anytime.