Understood. My post wasn’t meant to be a put down on military pilots either, just to be clear. Having said all that, I’ve always envied the training that military guys get. It’s highly structured, highly demanding and you’re getting the training from IP’s that want to be there and want to teach. It’s almost the opposite in the civilian world. You have to deal with CFI’s who aren’t vested in teaching, don’t care about student development and are just padding their logbooks, don’t do any table talk or ground school and just want to ‘go fly.’ And on top of all that you’re paying for it. They’re not all like that but many of them are and it was frustrating when I was up and coming on my ratings. I certainly wish we had a training program on the civilian side that mimics the military’s, but there’s just no way to come up with the resources or funding for something like that.

A lot of times civilians are left to their own devices without enough mentorship or guidance between 0-1500 hours. I had a few former military pilots who were excellent mentors/instructors. One was helping me get my CFII. The other provided some high quality training to myself and other CFI’s in a cirrus (CSIP instructor). He was good. I can’t say that about the majority of civilian instructors I’ve had.