CGFLYER

That's true military guys are getting paid to fly and don't have to worry about the Hobbs meter. That being said it doesn't mean they can go fly for as many hours as they want to perfect their skills. I can't speak for the Air Force but with the NAVY you had X amount of flights to meet a certain standard and if you didn't meet it at the end of that block of training you would be up for a evaluation flight to determine whether or not you could continue training. I know a number of folks that ended up flying with CO of the squadron and were removed from training for not meeting the required performance levels. On the other hand when I was going through civie training if I needed additional flights there was no problem, just pay for the extra training and away you go.

I'm not saying that military pilots are the best, but the training system in my opinion is superior.

aquaholic

I can only speak for Navy, F-18 training. The guys you have instructing in the F-18 are all very experienced, most with a couple cruises and around 1,000 hours in type/model. As far as primary flight training in the T-34/T-6, they are taught by mostly Helo and P-3 pilots who have a different perspective than I do, but I do know that the students are held to a very high standard. Advanced jet students in the T-45 have traditionally been taught by mostly S-3, E-2/C-2, EA-6B, and some P-3 pilots. There are also SERGRAD instructors, the Navy’s equivalent of a FAIP. I only bring this up because of the vastly different missions, lifestyle, and general experiences I have had when compared to them. I can assure you they are all professionals in their respective fields.

There has been a great deal of discussion about what training is better, and being fairly experienced when I joined the Navy, I can honestly say that my military training was far superior to any I received in the civilian sector. Also discussed here, is the experience level of the military instructors, which I can assure you in the F-18 world, the pilots have had much more demanding piloting experiences than most of their civilian counterparts. Of course there are pilots there who have not flown single pilot since primary, or have not flown anything weighing less than 50,000 pounds in the past 18 years. Will they be proficient in a light twin or single in the VFR arena? Probably not, but I am sure they can be brought back up to speed fairly quickly.

The typical flight for an F-18 pilot flying off the boat in the North Arabian Gulf/Sea will generally follow this sequence. The brief will be three hours prior to launch time where you will cover the threats, weather, who you will be working with on the ground, what tankers you are going to hit, diverts, etc. There will usually be time to get something to eat prior to launch so that you won’t starve later. One hour prior to launch you will walk, get dressed in your survival gear, check out your NVG’s, pistol, tapes, etc. Either thirty or forty minutes prior to launch you will start the jet and start to get all your combat systems on line and checked out.

At launch time, generally after sunset, you will line up on the catapult and be flung off the front end of the boat into the black abyss. Once your eyes are not fuzzy anymore from the 0 to 180 knots acceleration in about 1.5 seconds, you check your instruments to make sure you have a good jet and are indeed flying away from the water. Now it is time to head to the rendezvous point at your assigned altitude to join up with your wingman, or wait for him to join on you. If everything is working, the two of you will press north into either Iraq or Afghanistan, otherwise, the spare will fill your spot and you will head to marshal to wait on the next recovery.

The flight north across the beach will have you talking to foreign controllers (which can be very interesting) until you get “into country” where you will talk to US controllers, very similar to ATC in the continental US. First stop is one of the tanker tracks to fill back up on gas, generally 10,000 to 12,000 pounds. Now you will head to your assigned working area, and help out the JTAC however you can. It might be just keeping surveillance over a convoy, watching a house, looking for IEDs, dropping either a laser guided or GPS guided weapon, or strafing targets.

After a time, you will need more gas so you will go find your next tanker, top back off and then check back in with your JTAC for the second vul of your flight. After that vul, you will again go find your tanker, top off and fly south and prepare to land back on the boat.

The procedures for getting back aboard the boat are very standardized on their own, so the boat tries to throw as many curveballs as possible to make it exciting. When you are issued your marshal (holding) instructions, you will copy down the holding radial, altitude, and your expected approach time. Your push (holding) point is determined by adding 15 to your altitude, and since the push times are only 1 minute apart, you must hit your push point at plus or minus 10 seconds or else you will screw your buddy that is behind you.

At your push time, you will penetrate at 250 knots, again you have to nail your airspeed as well so you don’t screw your buddy by being slow, or yourself by flying too fast. Keep in mind that the first part of each approach in a non-precision TACAN approach to an ILS or ACLS precision approach, to a visual approach using meatball, line-up, AOA to get aboard. The variables thrown at you are the final bearing is always walking away from you making line up an issue, compounding this is the ship turning, winds changing, and equipment failures. There are also the instances of low visibility where you will not be able to see the boat but the LSOs will see you and keep you out of trouble. Not in the gulf, you might also experience a pitching deck. Through all this, you are trying to catch one of four wires, spaced 40 feet apart, leaving you a 120 foot length of desirable runway or else you get to go around and do it all again until you get aboard. Of course you want to get aboard that first pass because it is dark, you have been in the jet for around 7 hours strapped into a small seat, and you do not want to miss midrats.

That is generally how it is if everything goes as planned, and you will get pretty comfortable with it, but that is hardly the case. What usually happens is there is a dust storm reducing the visibility to nothing, the tankers will fall out and you will have to find another, all the while you are worried about running out of gas, the tanker will be in the clouds and refuse to change altitude, there will be thunder storms all over the area, especially 88AS, you will have to revert to standby instruments, run out of piddle packs, lose an engine and have to divert into Al Asad in a dust storm, lose your INS, the boat will be down to only one or two wires, the TACAN will quit working, the boat parks right next to the “Black Line” off Iran, or a multitude of other problems.

This goes on for 6 plus months, only to turn around and do it again within the year. During that time you will find yourself on the boat several times doing the same thing, just for not as long of time. Or you will be at an airwing exercise where you have 20 jets in the same airspace at night, in the weather, in the mountains, fighting each other. Training rules are of course supposed to keep you safe.

Believe me, the pilots instructing Navy F-18 pilots in the FRS have plenty of experience, have more instrument time than they care to, and have chewed the seat cushion up with their butt plenty of times. All the while, they ultimately have the responsibility for taking someone’s life, and flying safely around the boat and in the busy airspace that exists around Baghdad and the like. As an instructor, they always have to fly their own jet at a high rate of speed, as well as keep their junior student wingman, who is usually hanging onto the horizontal stab, safe and within the restricted area/MOA.

I apologize for the length of this post, but there have been plenty of uninformed or inexperienced pilots offering their opinions and I just wanted them to see where many of the military guys are coming from. This argument will never be settled, and there will always be cases of a military pilot being a bonehead and vice versa. You also need to look at what community a respective military pilot comes from because they are vastly different. Some guys do airline style flying while others are flying helicopters, and others are bending the jet around, flying low, pointing at the ground, and fighting each other.

rickair7777

Actually, they are the best but it's an apples to oranges comparison.

Military candidates are selected based on their performance potential, determined by an evaluation of their academic, athletic, and other records as well as medical and cognitive testing.

The military also gets to pick the cream of the crop because they offer free training, often free college, good pay, real benefits, and prestige. Don't underestimate prestige, it has a dollar-value too.

Then they provide high-quality training, but in limited quantities...you either learn fast and keep up, or you go home.

Once you finish training, you have about ten years to kill yourself and/or wreck an airplane while conducting tactical flying. If you make it through those ten years unscathed, the airlines would love to talk to you!

We all know about civilian training. There's certainly nothing to prevent someone with great potential from hooking up with a great training program, but you also get mediocre wannabees who can keep paying for more training, and retesting again and again after numerous failures (ala colgan).

But the military requirements are greater than most civilian missions, so again it's not a fair comparison.

IC ALL

"I apologize for the length of this post, but there have been plenty of uninformed or inexperienced pilots offering their opinions and I just wanted them to see where many of the military guys are coming from."

Don't apologize. Welcome to APC.

SkyHigh

Years ago I was an instructor and pilot at a part 135 organization. Management handed me two new hires to train who were straight out of the military. One was a F16 guy and the other was flying a KC-135. My job was to train them to fly a multi-engine piston plane. Neither of them had any small plane experience. We had to start out in the Cessna 182. It took three lessons before the F16 guy could figure out how to get the plane started.

In the end it was like I was dealing with primary students. Management eventually gave up and made them Lear FO's. It is not about the quality of training. To me it is about the mission that you are trained for. These guys were totally unprepared to fly a Seneca alone at night in IMC. However I am sure that they could handle a fighter in tight formation.

The question is who is the best for the airlines? I don't really know, but if you need to land on a small lake in the wilderness then use a bush pilot. If you are wanting to bomb a mud hut from 30,000 feet then get a military pilot. If you want to hire a satisfied and happy regional airline pilot then find a guy who does not know what it is like to land on a "boat" at night or the satisfaction that comes from surviving the bush.


Skyhigh

Broheim

Some of these posts definitely had me rolling my eyes because they were very biased. I'm no expert either but I got my civilian PPL before going naval aviation and I've had both civilian flight academy and military instructors.

In my experience, military instructors tended to be more demanding and more stressful. My civilian instructors were easier to talk to and that translated to a more positive learning environment for me, but I also took longer and progressed slower in that environment. Conversely, my military instructors were very precise and very tough to have a conversation with, but I learned more (via the fire hose method) and I learned it much more quickly. I felt more comfortable with civilian instructors but I became a better aviator with military instructors.

I also think that comparing the military as a whole to civilian aviation is TOTALLY unfair because different branches of the military, and different airframes, produce totally different pilots and cannot be generalized. The best example I can give you: compare Coast Guard and Army pilots. They are like apples and oranges; army pilots typically have better stick and rudder skills because they fly a lot of low level/combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Coast Guard pilots typically have better instrument skills because they fly almost constantly in IMC doing search and rescue. Neither service/flight training is better than the other, it is simply the experiences of each branch - army pilots usually fly in visual conditions in a combat zone and coast guard pilots usually fly in the worst weather imaginable and have to rely more on instruments. Both pilot groups are top notch but if you were to compare an army pilot to a civilian trained RJ pilot, I would bet money on the civilian RJ pilot having far better instrument skills and IMC experience because army blackhawk pilots don't fly IMC very often and instrument flying is not emphasized as much in training at rucker as it is in other branches. I hope this makes sense.

USMCFLYR

Sky -

I call bull on this. I don't believe it for a second. A guy who is used to running multiple checkluists at once, and I guarantee you has plenty of SA on the ground and in the air, will have no trouble starting a Cessna 182 after the first lesson. I hope this isn't an indication of your instructing kills as well

USMCFLYR

SkyHigh

Oh no, it is true. It was not the checklist that was the problem. He had no instincts for how to finesse a piston engine. He kept flooding it out or having a difficult time with the starter. I had to take over before the battery went dead. He also had no idea of what the rudder was.

I am not trying to bash the guy. He was very disciplined, smart and read the information but had no experience at all with the type of flying we did in part 135 piston charter.

I have other militarily pilot to civilian stories as well but will spare you. The good news is that the military guy was hired at AA soon after getting checked out in the lear. My whole point is that everyone hopefully is adequately trained for their own flight environment.

If you are suggesting that all it takes to fly a piston part 135 plane is to follow a checklist then perhaps all it takes to fly an F18 is a checklist as well? Somehow I don't think so.

Skyhigh

rickair7777

I tend to agree. I had a recently retired viper guy show up to get his civilian CFII. The guy had almost no time in a 172 but his instrument flying was absolutely rock solid...an autopilot could not have done a better job. Everyone knows that an examiner can always find something to fail you on...this guy was the exception...he was literally never out of PTS tolerances. He was accustomed to very precise performance tolerances at high speeds, in the slow GA airplane he had all the time in the world.

Where I have seen fighter guys get in trouble in GA is when they rent light airplanes and then go chase womp-rats in the canyons...they are accustomed to being able to resolve poor planning by using augmentation. I know of 4-5 guys who have died here in SOCAL in the last decade, plus one who is messed up really badly.

ryan1234

We have former F-16 guy here who always puts flat spots on the tires of the 172 and actually did have difficulty starting (almost every time) and taxis at 1500 while riding the brakes.... here's the other part of the story.. he flew F-4s, then transitioned the F-16.. he hasn't flown F-16s in 15 years and hadn't flown period in 15 years. I can cut the guy some slack... so I guess it depends on a number of variables including currency. Like I said before the FA-18 guys I fly with... well... I don't think I've ever seen better instrument skills.... they also never left flying, they continued after they got out of the service.

On the subject of starting engines... some fuel injected single engine aircraft especially with a certain engine manufacturer, if you're new to that airplane it can require a couple starts to get a finese for manipulating everything at one time. Some aircraft are just different in that regard.