Tester07
I'm very glad to hear it - neither military nor civil methods have a monopoly on best practice. Having said that, the biggest culture shock that I met on escaping a military environment to a civil one wasn't the use of BCAR/JAR .v. Def-Stan - at the end of the day they're basically saying the same thing in a different order. The big difference I found, between military test flying (either as practiced at BDN or as I was taught on the 9 months at ETPS I managed to complete) is that in military testing the bottom line is whether the test team consider the "product" satisfactory or not.
In civil certification much work is done before testing, and often even design starts on determining the approval standard. If an aircraft diverges to the tiniest degree from the standard - even if it's considered acceptable - in a civil test programme this is a huge drama requiring high level meetings, soul-searching, re-drafting of specifications, etc. I'm not saying that this is a better system (where handling qualities are concerned in particular, it's almost certainly not!), but it's a totally different philosophy and way of working.
XS439
I can't for the moment see why it creates a problem for the 4 mil schools and NTPS. It's in everybody's interest to have a competent and healthy FT community surely, and I can't see the worlds airforces - their primary customers - ever seeing another route to gain the quality human and eventually engineering products that they need.
Arguably the further you get from the military environment that can afford full-time FT training the more useful it becomes.
G
N.B. Okay, okay, I was chopped - but I use the teaching I got prior to that, if there's a better aeronautical education than those 9 months, I've not yet seen it - maybe the 2 months I missed!. This doesn't detract from my more serious points about routes to competence and FT licensing.
Last edited by Genghis the Engineer; 12th Oct 2003 at 04:17.