I'm ex-military (a long, long time ago). I thought that the military system was very thorough and covered the basics in far greater depth than is required for civil training. This is probably just because a lot of military pilots fly single pilot (or did in my day) and are thrown in at the deep end fairly early on compared with many of their civil counterparts. They are required to be rather more of a 'jack of all trades'. However, the nature of the military instructors could be rather antagonistic compared with a number of civil instructors I have encountered; as some military instructors seemed to have little or no empathy with, nor sympathy for, their students who were merely pieces of meat in the sausage machine.
I have been a civilian for considerably longer and spent quite a few years as an ab-initio instructor and as a training captain. I found that civil students were just the same as military students - a mixture of (very few) excellent, (most) average and a (very few) bit below average. Some people are slow starters and after a bit of a shaky start have matured into excellent, well-rounded pilots.
I think that part of the problem has nothing to do with whether a pilot is really considered to be good or bad, it's just that after a number of years in the military one tends to have a different attitude to some things. If this continues and manifests itself as the consideration that one is superior, that is a bad thing. Similarly, if one has worked only as a civilain pilot and has some sort of attitude problem about ex-military pilots, that is also a bad thing. At the end of the day, as civil pilots we all have the same job to do and in these days of JAR Ops and CRM should be able to put aside differences in our early flying development, work together and have respect for anyone who does his job in a competent and professional manner.
