If I had to choose between a guy who has "everything else" and a guy who can really fly an airplane, I'll go with "everything else" every day and twice on Sunday. The problem is the service volume of a VOR or the nitrogen concentration in blood at 20k is neither. You can teach NEITHER how to fly an airplane or the "everything else" (that's meaningful) in a classroom.
I usually agree with you. However, on this I'll have to disagree.
There is
NO reason that we can't have both. For some reason, on JC, education and experience seem mutually exclusive.
They are not, the discussion should be
100% INCLUSIVE of both.
In fact, isn't the motto of the famous FlightSafety "The best safety device in an aircraft is a well trained pilot..."?
Education, whether one desires to accept it or not, is just as important as experience. Not
more important, nor
less important than experience, but
just as important.
We need to accept some facts that there are glaring holes in our training process on the civilian path to professional piloting.
Are military pilots highly desired for there superior flying skills? Egos aside, probably not. It has more to do with a consistent set of skills and knowledge acquired through the training process. You can even see this supplant experience as companies usually will hire military pilots with lower total time than people with straight civilian flying backgrounds.
In the civilian world, and many of you probably won't like reading this, there is such a huge spread in quality of training. From the University programs, like Purdue and UND that have a very structured training environment geared to put one in a professional cockpit from day one to the very good, but very low volume Part 61 school off in the middle of nowhere at the one end of the spectrum. At the other end is the FAA-minimum required training pilot mills. Unless someone is very familiar with the output of a specific school, one can not be sure of their training standards.
How do I know that FAA training minimums may not be the best? The insurance industry and the various other rating systems (such as IOSA) that drive more in-depth and specific training requirements.
