How exactly do you think military checklists vary from civilian ones?

1) Yes, it’s possible. The military training system is better for the military aviation goals. The civilian training system is better for the civilian aviation goals (designed by the FAA for the industry run by the FAA...). It’s really not that hard to comprehend. CRM is one example of a HUGE issue airlines were having with mil guys adapting in the past. Great study out there. College curriculums that put emphasis on CRM skills have been proven to be better than any candidate with military training. Airlines had to take extra steps in implementing programs to combat this deficit from the military side.

2) This question is irrelevant. I don’t need to have experience with both training systems when my end goal is to be a product of the civilian industry, hence why my training/background is tailored towards that. I don’t need to know how to drop bombs, evade air defense, how to abandon my injured aircraft. This stuff doesn’t make you a better candidate to get the 737 A to B.

This statement proves you don’t know or have much experience with military flying/pilots or the training.

You lost all crediability with this statement! Sorry for your inferiority complex!

FYI
Your above statement is unique to 121 flying, military is not safety/divert centric...it’s mission centric.

I’ve been through both. I’ll feed the troll.

UPT - regimented groundschool. Multiple tests, passing grade is between 80-90% depending on the manpower requirements. Fail two and you go to a review board that might kick you out or remediate you and return you to training. Those two failures follow you, so if you fail a check ride down the road prior to winging, you’re right back at a review (elimination) board. You’re also going through in depth survival and physiological training that gets repeatedly refreshed over the course of your flying career.

80ish hours of primary flying. Multiple sorties most days as a student. Emergency procedures on every contact flight are practiced repeatedly. Students get multiple simulated engine out landings on every flight. Everything in the pocket checklist that we can simulate, we do, and the syllabus tracks and makes sure it’s not just an exposure item but that they get multiple looks at every EP. Formation flying. Full instrument procedures with 3-5 approaches per instrument hop. Each of these sections has at least one if not two jeopardy check rides. Fail it and you start down the elimination process which is two more flights.

More of the same in advanced training. No flap, single engine, compound complex EPS are your bread and butter, in the weather in the airplane. SIMs are more of the same. I was never as good of an instrument pilot in the 3500 hours since Advanced as I was leaving Corpus Christi after flying the C-12 around the Valley of the Downs. Lots of real world practice getting into and out of fields ranging from untowered all the way up to busy class B. Lot’s of ‘here’s what the book says, here’s how it works in real life.’ Tons of CRM taught, either inter-cockpit or inter-flight depending on which track one is on.

Tons of system knowledge required from my platform...remember, you may operate with your crew and a maintenance kit at a remote location and need to know what is safe and possible and what is not.

More of the same at the RAG or RTU, just in your actual platform now.

121 training: disjointed by comparison. Multiple days with no real rhyme or reason and multiple instructors at the training center who’d never actually flown the line for my company. Lots of FAA mandated stuff slopped together. The sims were excellent at training me to do more of the same EPs in the weather, but very little on what we actually do 99.99% of the time. Fast time to train, but looking at the material afterwards, it could have been way more efficient. The days are not densely packed and have way too much death by PowerPoint.

Both have positives and minuses. Proficiency develops more fully at the training command because there’s less of a demand signal in terms of cost and you obviously get tons of reps at everything. You are ‘qualified’ faster at a 121 training center because you aren’t worth a damn until you have that check ride complete.

Point A to Point B is an afterthought in the military. It’s just assumed you will know how to do it because we don’t have time to teach a winged aviator how to do all the admin stuff once they are at a squadron. They should know it the way the book says it so they are plug and play with every other nugget is a squadron.

Time is spent on tactics, upgrading, and accumulating qualifications, all while doing multiple ground jobs that increase in responsibility and leadership requirements. As a 25 year old, I lead a division of about 100 maintenance sailors, was a mission commander, and qualified as an instructor pilot in my platform. My experience is not unique, it’s just expected that you will figure out how to manage that. You develop resourcefulness and maturity, or you fail.

After about a year on the line, there’s no functional difference in a prior regional FO or a prior mil guy. Each airline has its own way of doing things, so other than being sharper at bidding and knowing some of the acronyms, unless someone has time in that airframe, there’s not much that a regional guy brings that a mil guy can’t learn just as quickly in training.

As far as why hiring likes mil guys the bell curve is much tighter and the standard deviation much smaller when you can look at a guys resume and see if he got the good jobs or the not so good jobs, if you know what you’re looking for. There’s just not that much room for someone who really really sucks to keep flying long enough to get to the stay or go point in the military. I’m sure bad apples snake through, but overwhelmingly, we are a known quantity (plus or minus a few quirks based on service and platform). Other than learning the automation and company specific CRM, the plane is still just a plane. 99% of what I do in this job was the part that was taken for granted in mil aviation. No one gave a **** how good an ILS you could shoot...all they cared about was the mission. What was important was how you dealt with everything else that can go sideways on a mission. Essentially, hiring people like us because we’ve already practiced for the .01% of the time things go poorly.

Anyone can go from point a to point b on the autopilot. It isn’t that hard.

Thanks for the effort spent on the write-up.

But, this isn’t about who’s a better pilot. It’s about who’s a better candidate for 121 comparing mil to civ training PRIOR to any 121 experience.

Interesting though, because other than the survival and physiological training this is almost identical to my training at the local FBO. Except, I was financing it. Putting myself and then family under huge amounts of pressure. Knowing that any failures accumulated would follow me to the hiring board. I’ve received nothing but training to go from A to B and how to deal with the million things that can go wrong in between. Basically the only thing that 121 carriers do...

People like you are what is wrong with this thread. Did you always have such contempt for your pilot brethren who came up a different (and much more challenging route,) or was this a recent development?

That was your experience. That may not be true with every civilian flight school. Seeing the 3.5 hours of ‘training’ I got at my ATP compared to what guys had to do for the type ride at a place like CPT, there is a huge variation in standards. Being in the job and seeing the lack of reps between recurrent, there is no doubt I was a more prepared aviator for all the things that can go wrong when flying in the military. Once a year just doesn’t compare to how often we practiced all the weird stuff all the way through my entire mil flying career.

Not saying regional guys suck at all, in fact most of my studying/beer drinking was done with an equal split of regional guys and corporate dudes, I’m just pointing out that in terms of standardization, there is a much more known quantity with the mark 1 mil guy to the hiring goons.

No contempt. Just defending civilian pilot training.

People like you are the ones thinking you’re better candidate’s in a 121 operation because of your background. Arrogance with no results to back it up.

I remember reading stuff like this when I was still in the military and wondering how difficult the transition would be.

Turns out it was incredibly easy. I spent most of my time in training drinking and shopping for a house. Somehow the other military pilots and I breezed through the gauntlet of 121 training. The only guy that really struggled was a long time regional captain who had been going “point A to point B” for a long long time and couldn’t shift gears.

Then, why is there a clear preference by airlines over the decades for former military trained pilots? They’re the ones deciding what makes a better candidate.

GF