It’s interesting (and illuminating) to see here people with some serious experience under their belts reminiscing about the days before they got onto the -9. An outsider might put it another way: “It’s interesting to see who were the people who flew the -9 and where they came from.”
As one who, being ex-military, cannot claim to have gone through it myself, (so no self-congratulations involved here), I believe the Australian GA system, produced quite possibly the finest "product" for airlines possible - a far better all round operator than any of today's cadet schemes could ever hope to produce. GA was (and I suspect still is) a self-culling system which got rid of most (I accept, only "most") of the dross before the pilot presented himself to an airline.
I base this opinion on having trained quite a few of them and flown with many more, both as their FO and their captain.
I think the current system favoured by many of the world's airlines, (conceived originally by BA?), of training their pilots from scratch "so they won't learn any bad habits" before they join the airline is misconceived in the extreme. You end up with a pilot who's very good at what he does, (in a very narrow field), but with virtually no experience in aviation of anything else, so that the very first time he gets a really bad fright and has to deal with it, he may have 350+ people immediately behind him and in his care.
A pilot with 1500 hours or more in GA under his belt before he starts in an airline - (particularly, in my opinion, those who gained some of that experience in PNG) - had dealt with myriad situations, the odd one laced with pure terror, and made decisions no cadet would ever be likely to see.
As I’ve already mentioned, today's ex-cadets are good at their jobs, I'll not argue with that, but if one day something totally out of left field presents itself, (like the recent "Hudson River One" STAR), I wonder who the pax down the back would prefer to have up front? A pilot of the old school who’s had a few frights and dealt with a few unusual situations in a 206 in the New Guinea Highlands or their equivalent, or one of the increasingly large proportion of airline captains of today who’ve been trained from Day One to engage the autopilot at 200’ on takeoff and to leave it in until 200’ on finals?
Indeed some airlines (my current employer for one) insist that the highest available level of automation be used at all times on the line – (the direct antithesis of Ernie Gann’s captain from ‘Fate is the Hunter’ who lit matches under his FO’s chin as the FO flew an instrument approach in trying conditions). The letter announcing this policy contained the unforgettable phrase: “...the line is no place to practise your flying skills”. My immediate question on reading this was: “Well where else am I going to do it?”
I’m not advocating we light matches under our FOs’ chins, but some of the stories I’ve read on this thread of the things we learned from those old, sometimes irascible ‘old time’ captains who we still highly esteem to this day make me wonder if we might be doing the next generation of aviators no favours with what has become the norm in Aviation today.