Learning to land in a crosswind is learning to fly, like you said, in a petri dish.

The 121 environment is not a petri dish. We can't just reset the simulator on the Colgan crash. haha, red screen, now what did we learn from that? This is the real world, not a petri dish.

I'm not knocking military training at all, but its training. Just like a new doctor, he's got all the training, but he needs the experience before he's the chief of whatever. (sorry, don't watch enough ER type shows)