Thanks, Alex, for your reply.
You are probably right, funny thing is our head of tech dept., the guy giving us lessons on the ground (who is an incredibly deep engineer, btw), thought us philosophy n°1.
Excellent engineer, as I said, but also a failed commercial pilot, and you can almost immediately spot a subtle resentment buried very deep in his personality.
There's no escape, that damn missing stripe on one's shoulders definitely cannot be forgotten, as someone on this forum keeps showing.
LEM