Not sure why you have such a problem with the concept of learning something on a command course. Is this such a foreign concept? A command candidate should turn up knowing the books backwards,
Well if command candidates were trained then great. They are expected to turn up and know every little nuance of being a captain. A position they have never held in this airline and therefore cannot possibly have seen every concievable scenario. Flying long haul for ten years does not prepare you for regional flying. An example might be the way in which your C+T passes on Local knowledge. People fall down on courses when the checker could have just given a "heads up" to the candidate on his first exposure to "xyz" and then the candidate would know it from then on.
knowing the sops and all the possible variations and interpretations of evey in and out... This is a basic prerequisite. Polish? I hope we are talking about the same thing.
This is fleet dependant. Much harder to know what all the preferences of the C+T s on the 400 than on the 777. In a big airline sops would be SOPS and not convention or opinion or your words :interpretations. The main problem I have with SOP vs. Convention vs. Opinion is that we are checked on conventions and opinion as if they are SOPS. On the 400 fleet you can get 2 s for SOPS for not following the checker's opinion. It is really very simple make the hard and fast conventions into SOPS. To do that add them to FCOMM 3 IN WRITING. We could start with the mouth music (not a prob if you have picked it up along the way, but for the new joiner only learned through osmosis). If you don't think there is any confusion check out the FAQ sect of the 400 FCTM and read the newly ammended introduction. I only hope you have the maturity to read between the lines.
You are way off mark suggesting that anyone tries to cruise through a command course here. The one good thing about a check and failing system is that people do the work. THEY BUST THEIR BACKS to prepare. There are a certain amount of justifiable failings but there are also those that should have passed. If we get a more standardised training criteria and standardised assesment process it would go along way too improving the moral on this issue.
We all know the process (command and command selection RT PC line checks) can be easy or impossible depending on who you get. That would not happen if all you say were true. Nobody wants to suck it and see !!
FG