Flight test training at the moment is, let's face it, a bit of a mess: although possibly that's actually a good thing. There is a straightforward route - for those small number of people who have gone military --> TPS. But there are a lot of individuals for whom that's not (been?) an option. EASA have tried, badly and without the support of SFTE or SETP, to create a single solution to the problem and it's clearly not working well.
I recently as a freelancer got one-off approval from EASA for a CVE (FTE really) training course for a part 23 manufacturer: appropriate to the task but not involving any TPS, various of us have been approved for particular jobs based upon particular training and experience, and needless to say no two flight test programmes are alike anyhow.
Pretty much all of the "experts" in the community recognise that in reality you pick the best person for the job, based upon their whole experience and education background - and sometimes that best person is certainly an ex-military TPS grad. But even they're not alike - I don't want somebody whose experience is virtually all on combat aircraft to lead a short field transport programme, nor somebody whose experience is virtually all transport for a a fighter programme. I'm a pretty average pilot compared to several people posting on here and nobody in their right mind would give me an A320 to fly - but I have a PhD in flight mechanics, so might well be the best person for a university led flight mechanics research programme on a smaller aeroplane: that's just my profile. The lady we've been discussing sounds like she has a fair bit of airline operational experience - so you can see why she'd be regarded, as she's also had appropriate technical training, as a safe pair of hands in acceptance testing. I recall BDN once using an FTE who had several thousand hours on gliders as the TP for an air cadet glider programme, as his grasp of the aircraft and requirements was clearly far superior to that of the military TPs available.
There are ongoing attempts to create a relatively standardised licencing system - but that, frankly, is daft and hopefully doomed to failure. Aviation is too varied, and thus so are the range of test flying tasks for "one size fits all" to make real sense. The lady in question is just one example of that.
The best any of us can do is have the best possible combination of flying and technical experience and education, make ourselves available when opportunity presents, and keep trying to do the best job we can.
G
Last edited by Genghis the Engineer; 19th Apr 2015 at 14:04.