I’ve learned through experience that skill is important, to an extent. If you flew king airs for 9,000 hours and nothing but king airs, and then go to the airlines, and it’s your first 121 job, yea it’s going to be a learning curve alright. Whereas the guy that flew to 1500 hours and got a good variety of experience along the way will fare much better more than likely. But where they went for flight training doesn’t really mean diddly squat. After a certain point, what it REALLY boils down to is attitude and how you approach the training. That’s what I left out in my previous post, and it’s so important.

You can have people with good attitudes at both types of places we’re talking here, and people with bad attitudes. Regardless of training footprint, and I should also add regardless of experience level, the ones with the bad attitudes don’t fare well and often won’t make it. That said, sometimes even folks with good attitudes can fail as well. Doesn’t mean they’re bad. The more important thing is those are the people that learn from their mistakes. The ones with bad attitudes usually don’t learn from mistakes. They think they are better than everyone else and it shows. People know who they are.

Now, on the subject of the training institution. Training institution doesn’t really matter. The instructor(s) you get matters more than the name of the school/institution you attended. You could attend a brand name institution that everyone knows about or has heard of, but it may not have instructors who are doing a great job at getting people up to, and more importantly beyond the minimum standards. Since this industry always has a high turnover of CFI’s, it’s hard to determine if a particular school is good at teaching students simply because what may be good today, may turn out to be a bad school 3-4 months from now as newer CFI’s come in and the experienced ones are leaving for better jobs. The quality of the school ebbs and flows so much with 99% of civilian schools it’s not even funny.

Big name universities with flight programs are nothing special. Again, change my mind on how it affects a pilot in the grand scheme of things throughout his or her career. We all know that there’s too many CFI’s out there that are just building time, and not really vested in teaching. I’ve had 3 of them. I fired all 3 of them. Found one that cares about teaching. These types can be found anywhere.

I was ‘building time’ too, and told my students upfront when we first met, but I would shut up about it after that unless I was asked. Your success in flight training comes down largely to the instructors you get, and more importantly your attitude. All this 141 university flight training is better than 61 is nonsense, and your just pulling that out of your rear end. When you come out of brand name institution, you are not an ‘all-knowing Chuck Yeager super pilot.’ I get that vibe coming from people like you who went to ‘hard and rigorous’ 141 schools and they are nothing special dude.