Balance
The financial realities are continually talked about with reference to the airlines and the cost of low hours pilots.
Well the financial reality is that I cannot afford to work for nothing or pay to get the experience of heavy jets. Simply because I have a family to support. I do have to pay to keep my licence ticking over, mostly to Cash, Again and Again but also for medicals and IR renewals etc. I'm fortunate in being in a flying job, currently, which is military linked but I am no closer to getting a foot in the door with an airline that I can actually afford to work for.
I am under no illusion that my paucity of experience in Air Transport operations is not made up for by my RAF experience but some of the building blocks are transferrable. The RAF got on very well before I joined and has continued to do so since I left. Similarly civil carriers seem to have been doing just fine without me and no doubt will continue to do so even if I don't secure a right hand seat with one of them.
I would like to think that my military training would mean that I would not make the same mistakes that were made by the unfortunate Air France crew but never say never. We are all products of our training and previous history so I will be more susceptible to making different mistakes by either error or omission. Are these mistakes any more or less serious? Well frankly who knows? Cadet pilots from the likes of CTC Flexicrew etc are trained in a manner that the regulator deems fit for purpose and military guys are trained in a manner that the force deems fit for purpose. I don't think that the two products are polar opposites but apparently HR do. Sadly for us at the moment it is HRs view which counts.
Self evidently there are people in any walk of life with any number of backgrounds with whom you would rather not work. I'm really rather looking forward to learning a new role and meeting different people from different backgrounds since the majority of military aviators are relatively homogenous in their backgrounds. Does one bad experience with a former military aviator mean that we are all bad? No to suggest so of a racial or sexual orientation background would be rightly seen as illegal and offensive. Equally can we extend the stereotype of CTC cadets to all newly trained ab initio pilots? Of course not.
Sadly I am coming to the conclusion that having started in the military these days it means that you are either stuck there or are going to have to jump to a City type job rather than moving on to the airlines. Do I think that the airlines benefit in the long term from this? No but it's not my choice or decision.
A healthy mix of backgrounds within an organisation is likely to bring the breadth of experience which will allow an appropriate level of adaptability to ensure the profitability of the organisation.
Standing by to be told what an idiot I am.