Thank you jungle drums for your excellent summing up. Private jet - your posts about ex-military pilots are completely irrational and are broadly similar to someone who was mugged by a black youth 25 years ago hating all blacks for the rest of his life. You may indeed have met some bad apples from the RAF, but they are few and far between. I have met a handful of people who believe military fast jet training was superior to civilian training. I have been through numerous military fast jet and civilian airliner courses and none was better than my British Airways Airbus course at Cranebank. Fast Jet training teaches you to fly a particular fast jet in that role and nothing more. I found RAF training hard work and with some truly dreadful instruction. My civil training had many positive aspects and taught me how to fly a civilian airliner in all weathers, and for the most part the instructors were very good. When I left the RAF, I took the view that what was past was past, I now had new tricks to learn and that was that. Bearing in mind you need so much more experience to be a civilian Captain than a military one, I can only commend the quality of the Captains I have found in civilian life and their level of professional knowledge. As with the civilian world, RAF folk come in all shapes and sizes without any particular personality predominant. I find your sweeping generalisations totally inaccurate and bearing no relation to my own personal observations of the real world. I suspect most other people will feel the same.