Mr. Tullamarine:
Your well thought-out contrast in perspectives was what I've been wanting to read for quite a while on Pprune, instead of being ignored. I've asked such simple questions in the past, but maybe people read between the words and the tone was misunderstood.
My questions about foreign perspectives and ground training methodologies are never intended to be critical, despite being expressed in a skeptical and frank (too blunt?) manner. From listening to guys who studied similar material at Cathay P. etc, any pilot who makes it through such classes should be rather proud of his/her acheivements.
Sometimes the regulatory authorities have totally different policies and courses with entirely different goals, some of which (especially over here in the US) can be quite comical, i.e. some ATP Written courses, FE (727) Written Study Guides etc.
There is no secret about that. But they stress practical experience, perhaps to the detriment of other things. A recent tragedy involving a CRJ helps support that, although the corporate beancounters, who often lean heavily on training costs and training "footprint" (time), might be at least partly to blame-and this was long before the 9/11 recession.
Your explanations helped me at least partly understand the reasoning behind various topics (only tiny fragments are included on Pprune), which are/were often in a very short, condensed version over here.
Never mind certain "quick and dirty" military courses which are part of a type of training known many years ago as "drinking from a fire hose" over here. Even those courses might have changed and, in certain 'pipelines', have combined with other (govt.) departments over the years, i.e. Air Force and Navy. At least one segment of the US DOD, many years ago, seemed primarily interested in quotas filled than anything else, very condensed rote procedures followed, and what a 12-month blur it was... and some totally abbreviated conversion "courses" for civilian ratings were often despised by the civilian pilots who went through them the longer and very expensive way.
Maybe too much is always better than too little.