I once saw a TRI going inverted at 2000 ft on the Sim after a simple engine failure, and crashing... and the chief of training watching that and saying nothing...
Yep, so did I. I followed him into the sim, (nither of us had flown a box before) I barely touched the controls. Smooth as silk, but if I hadn't been warned I might well have set up a roll in the way he did, since the sim was unrealistically oversensitive.
Airlines pilots with pure civy background (pay for training, no failure as long as money flows) have never neen very good, and those days they become less and less impressive. Everybody knows that, but it's politically incorrect to write the truth.
I, and hundreds of self-trained pilots will have a jolly good larf about that tonight.
I spent a year just sitting beside new skippers on the fairly frisky BAC 1-11. What I witnessed was the complete gamut of skill levels. Some of the worst had been ex-mil - but then, so had some of the best.
When I spent a brief time with Laker, it was like a breath of fresh air. Young self-trained skippers with skills and professionalism the likes of which I haven't seen before or since.
In the sixties, one gained a lot of experience flogging to Spain - at night - with no radar. 30degrees, 45degrees? How about seeing the horizon bar go behind the shrouds, time and time again? Seemingly endless lightning strikes - one putting a 4" hole through the wing. And I mean through. And then having to beg to re-route to avoid going through it again on the way back.
Kids of today.
Some of the ex-mil blokes were utterly lost. They'd never seen a cloud, let alone the inside of a CB. Somewhat tongue in cheek, but it showed when the Transport Command blokes came along. The were generally fine. They'd seen it all before and quickly transferred their skills to the civil aviation world.
So, don't generalize. My feeling has always been those that have routinely had an empty aircraft to play with, get to be ahead of the game. Sitting in a huge computer, never having seen much go wrong? I recon there are kids on x-boxes with more hand-eye coordination.
Rant over.