I think regional pilots have tarnish their own reputations with out any help...

 

WOW River6. Some guy comes on and says that military is good and you jump all over him and then you make statements like the one in bold above? Seems you should take some on your own advice.
Imagine if I started a thread out saying that most civvie pilots are not good stick and rudder guys - AFTER having gone through training that is recognized as some of the best in the world!

USMCFLYR

 

I was thinking the same thing about major airline pilots since I can remember. Whether they were running DC-8's out of gas in Portland, attempting to land during severe thunderstorms on the Airport in Dallas or Little Rock, repeatedly plopping them into the river at La guardia rightside up (737-400) or upside down (F-28), smashing L-1011's into the Everglades because (like the Colgan crew) no one was flying the plane or flat out forgot to set the flaps in Detroit or Dallas because (like the Colgan crew) they were flapping their chops, it always amazed me how well they can retian their holier-then-thou attitude.

BRAVO !!!!!!!!...........it's nice to see soime consistancy still exists !

 

The longer you're in this business, the more you come to realize that good pilots are where you find them. The peacetime military does a pretty good job of weeding out those less able or less-suited, but so does a few thousand hours of hand-flying single-pilot, hard IFR in the middle of the night.

The guys coming out of college programs like ERAU and UND are pretty sharp. They may not speak in acronyms or of "pickling off 500 pound GBU's against Bad Guys" but they know their stuff when it comes to this business. Likewise, it's hard to fault a guy who's just come off a tour flying C-17's all over the world. Chances are, his shoes are a little better-shined than the average civilian pilot as well. That's because he hasn't had to buy them from the Goodwill Store for the last 10 years.

I don't think there's ever been a correlation shown between accident rates among military and civilian pilots at the major airlines.* That alone should tell you something.

This isn't about "Military vs. Civilian" pilots. It's about professionalism in the cockpit, a quality that was lacking when 3407 started it's approach.



*If there has been such a correlation, I'd like to see it.

 

If it's the best in world lets do a comparison of all the Major Airline crashes in the last 15 years and bet you any amount of money that 95% of the Captains who were piloting those aircraft were military trained. So the best training in the world comes with questions? To say a pilot who is trained in the military is a better pilot to someone who comes out of a school like Purdue, or ERAU is naive on your part. Most of the F-teen drivers and heavy drivers come to the majors with 1500tt over a period of 10 to 15 years which comes up to be 100 hours a year. In peace time, it's less than that. To say they are better pilots than some guy who has been flying RJ, ATR's in and out of Boston, LGA, JFK and logs 1000hour in one year and comes to the majors with 6000 hours of airline experience is a joke!

A few recent crashes that had Captains all trained by the Uniited States military.

Captain Richard Bushmann AMR flight that crashed in LIT
Captain Edward States AMR flight that crashed in Queens
Captain Nicholas Tafuri AMR flight that crashed in Cali

All were contibuted to pilot error. Accidents happen and will continue to happen for some ex-military/aviation expert to say the Colgan Captain was not as well trained as military pilot is a crock!

 

If I'm not mistaken, the f/o on the Queens crash was at the controls and he was a civilian - former American Eagle pilot.

Hard to recover the aircraft after your copilot sheds the vertical stab.

 

1500 hours in 10 years?.... you are out of your mind. MAYBE ...MAYBE a fastmover driver who had a desk tour in that 10 years.... Heavy drivers.. C-17 guys... C-5 guys... and the 141 guys... as well as the 130 guys... I would bet over the past 20 yrs have averaged a hell of alot more than your 100 hours per year you talk about. I flew the line in hercs for 4 years and another year on wing staff and managed 2000 hours...many of my squadron mates flew 2500 hours or more during that time period.

For what its worth..YOU are the one who talk about walking on water, I believe if you read ALL my posts you will see that I have the utmost respect for civilian trained pilots and I specifically pointed out what I consider the main difference. MORE the half of my current flight time is flying civilian aircraft ... the ATR-42 in BOS, JFK, DCA, MIA etc... E170's out of ATL, ORD, DFW, MIA, DEN etc.... and most recently 4 different models of the citation.....I have known great MIL trained guys... and great CIV trained guys....and not so great guys on both sides.... I asked a mainline recruiter once why ( and this was years ago when DAL heavily favoured MIL guys ) they hired so many MIL vs CIV guys ...he response was they felt over all they got more of a known quantity overall to the type of training they had been exposed to... that was it.....its was that simple. This is way to complex a discussion to say which is better... each guy or gal stands on their own merit.

Have a great day River6!!

 

It’s sad to say this tragedy could have been avoided. The Colgan knew of the pilot’s substandard performance in training and checking. When I say Colgan, I mean the instructors, check airmen, Director of Training, Chief Pilot, and D/O. Under the regs, the FAA is also kept in the loop about check and training events, along with pass/fails.

With that being said, Colgan did him an injustice by upgrading him perhaps before he was actually ready for command. Reading the transcripts it also appears the F/O was way behind the aircraft and it’s systems possibly due to the nonchalant conversation and her fear of flying in icing conditions.

Winter operations alone is very demanding on one’s attention and experience. It’s unfortunate that carriers don’t require first officers, contemplating upgrade, to operate from a base for a full winter season and get real hands on experience. To quote Shakespeare “4,000 hours PIC in the south a winter pilot does not make.”

Airline training curricula merely require training in stall recognition , and not actual stall escape procedures. That’s a disgrace. I know… I know since we don’t intentionally perform stalls in the aircraft, why should we train stall recoveries in the simulator. Would training stalls have saved the crew? Would have experiencing the stick pull system in the simulator saved the crew? Nobody can answer that question.

 

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.

 

Please, both of you, educate us on what those "happy feet" entailed?

Or rather, what was the AA crew trained to do by their airline when encountering an upset?