Present day airline training... Permit me to close my mouth, and say that I am glad to retire soon. It went from excellent to bad, to worse. I went from classroom 727 flight engineer instruction through 747 check-captain and examiner in a span of over nearly 40 years with airlines.
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Opinions mentioned here by some of you gentlemen, is comparison of FAA licensing concepts and European style training. My opinion about the FAA, is that it produces proficient Cessna and Piper pilots... sadly, not too many airlines operate C-150 long haul routes. Not joking here, I know one pilot that has a ATPL single engine rating... oh sorry, that is on a C-172, must be a "heavy" with that 4 seats-configuration... (!)
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Pilots holding an FAA ATPL have NO idea about airline aircraft flying, other than reading charts of 727 performance, terminology of zero fuel weight or maximum 30 days flight time limitations. All the rest of the training, flight training, is about Cessna and Piper machines.
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Then, who provide the training... Flight Instructors... These "airline academies" and "air colleges" have flight instructors teaching future airline pilots, who themselves have
no airline pilot experience. In the FAA world, flight instructors, are rather inexperienced, low time pilots building time hoping to reach a minimum "experience level" to be hired by an airline (if you call 1,000 hrs instructing in a Cessna as "experience")... In my early days, instructors were highly experienced with thousand of flight hours, retired from the military or the airlines. And you did learn a lot from them... In my new hire class, with PanAm in 1968, ex-military pilots were 2/3rds of the group...
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European training is excellent in academics... As I am originally from Europe, and while training in the USA with the FAA curriculums, I had manuals and publications from the UK/CAA and books from the ENAC (France), and I never failed to supplement my studies with that material.
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Airline training (shall I dare to say "real airline training") for a new hire was then 3 months long, from endoctrination, to line training, oftentimes as flight engineer. And we received a small salary, during that training, with motel paid by the airline, and per diem... Nowadays, you pay a fortune for your CRJ training in an "airline academy" (with a nice name attracting many customers) and you pay for your motel and meals, for a "3 weeks quickie" and maybe you "might" be hired by an airline... anyway, you PAY for the training, that is what counts for the school, and the airline (shall we call it "regional airline", which you hope to leave soon for a major air carrier). If you are not "good enough" to qualify for that regional airline, as a "reject", you might qualify as an instructor at your "air college", teaching CRJ systems, because your total experience is 45 minutes flight time in a CRJ...
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In the late 1960s, ab-initio SABENA training in Belgium, was 27 months long, and the first position after training was F/O CV-440...
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With my current airline in South America, we hire pilots with any ICAO CPL/IR/ME. We only select applicants with a turbojet type rating, a Citation CE-500 rating is OK, but we prefer pilots with 737/DC-9 rating. Yet if rated on the 737, you will spend 3 months of training with us to become F/O 737. We have 7 weeks of classroom training, with yes, basics of high altitude operations, aerodynamics, turbojet engines, or navigation and other basics... lots of things that "ATPL" pilots never studied, or forgot...
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We used to hire pilots with no jet experience, long ago, but we had a high failure rate in training. We now require the type rating on a turbojet aircraft, our new hires are nearly 100% pass rate. And yes, we pay a salary during training, and motel, and per diem...
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I believe there is a definite crisis in the concept of airline training. It may be (for the USA), ever since the major carriers decided to dump their local services into associated regional airlines, that operate jet aircraft such as the CRJ. After all, these local operators were merely FAR 135 operators, who now adapted theirselves to basic FAR 121 requirements, but far from being succesful with training standards.
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Asking for my opinion, I would recommend the "ab-initio" training concept, performed with the airline itself.
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Happy contrails