Originally Posted by taurus12

Seems like the civillian versus military training has some egos flaring. Here's my 2 cents, if I may...

I went to a ma & pa flight school for my private, then to a well-renowned university for everything up through my CFII, and then the military. From my experience, military training is by far the best. Granted, skills such as formation & low-level flying don't DIRECTLY correlate to 121 ops, but they do enhance your overall skill and SA. That's not saying that civillian training is sub-par (several people I know from places like UND & ERAU are really really sharp)... it's almost comparing apples & oranges. You can't compare getting 200 (+/-) hours in 4 years in light single and twin piston aircraft to getting the same time in 1 year starting off with 1,100 shp and then transitioning to an mach 1 capable aircraft built in the 60s with no auto-pilot. (Fyi, I'm not trying to geek-out with the 1,100 shp and supersonic BS... I'm just trying to point out that 201 hp isn't really "high-performance" anymore). Anyways, that's just what happens when you are able to spend $1 Million on each pilot you train. Was the 200+ hours of civillian training bad? Absolutely not! There is something to be said for a program that has a syllabus and will boot you if you don't meet standards instead of re-taking the test until you pass, but that's another story.

Now, if I were to apply for an airline job, I'm positive the biggest obstacle myself or any fellow military pilot would have to overcome would be the civillian methods and procedures. Let's not go attacking stick-and-rudder skills... every military pilot I know has had to pass a formation checkride (military guys back me up on this). I doubt CRM would be an issue either (unless you're dealing with a REALLY old-school type-A guy which can come from either side these days). CRM is taught heavily in the military, even for single-seat fighter types.

When I was getting a degree in aviation, I was being groomed by civillian training to be an airline pilot. It would have been a relatively easy shoe-in to go through regional training because our civillian syllabus was written by regional airline guys. The same holds true for civillians going through military training. A scary number of CFIs fail out of UPT... not because they're bad pilots, but because they think that their hundreds of hours in Cessnas and Pipers have paved the way for their military career... it's a very different style of flying. The point I'm trying to make is that you're going to have example of people struggling whether it's military to civillian or visa versa.

In my opinion, it's what you do with your hours that makes you the pilot you are. If you hand-fly a complex aircraft in a variety of airspace, weather, and flight conditions and you get the most out of every hour, then I'd say you're set up to have many of the attributes that make a great pilot. If, on the flip-side, you flick on the AP at 600 AGL (not that an auto-pilot is a sin) and take a nap for a few hours until RAPCON wakes you up, I think you're setting yourself (and whatever you're hauling) up for disaster. Don't be a passenger when you should be a pilot.