Advanced Ratings Pre-Military

[Windchill]

Anyone reading my reply in "I'm Lost" will see that I wrote about the non-necessity of getting advanced civilian ratings to look better to a UPT Candidate Selection Board, and how in some ways it may be looked down upon.

This is taken from one who has been there, posted at baseops.

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Here's what I saw...

Tweets:

We had 1 CFI and 1 Commercial pilot drop on request

We had one guy with advanced civil ratings get eliminated.

Our top stick in Tweets was a Marine with 25 hrs.

Our top AF dude to go to -38's had his 40 hr PPL and that's it.

Of our 2 dudes who went to Corpus, one was a CFI, one was a PPL guy

T-Ones

Our DG had a couple hundred hours, and of our top few dudes, one was a CFI, two had their PPL's.

As you can see, it was pretty mixed. There is a lot more to pilot training than showing up with a ticket full of ratings. Being a team player and knowing the military way of doing business will pay great dividends.

BTW, as an ATC guy, you hold the same double edged sword I did as a former -135 nav. You'll have people tell you "Oh, it'll be so easy, you already know how to talk on the radios, blah, blah, blah." I don't know your background, but I personally had never ever seen anything that compares to the RSU Controlled Tweet traffic pattern. There are just enough differences to not let you rest on your experience.

I think that was the hardest thing for our civillian fliers to overcome was the AETC way of talking on the radio in a pattern full of 12 Tweets and not pissing everybody off. Our flight commander would routinely yell "You guys need to lose your ******* civillian habits!" so much that we would say it to each other anytime anyone said the word "Piper" or "Hobbs-meter" or anything else associated with your local FBO.

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[aloft]

Most guard and reserve units won't even consider someone for a UPT slot who doesn't hold at least a commercial ticket. My CFI for my private ticket is just finishing F-16 RTU/FTU and an RJ FO I know at ACA/i was picked up for an ANG A-10 slot. That said, most people with civilian ratings tend to keep that information to themselves as it's looked down-upon within military aviation circles.

That said, the more friends I see go through UPT and the more UPT materials I read, the less I'm convinced that the military has a lock on that caliber of training. For instance, I've been reading the AF IFR training manual and it's not any better than several of the civilian IFR manuals--some of which are actually better than the AFMAN IMHO. It'd be difficult, but not impossible, to train to the same standards in the civilian sector as is done in the military--the equipment being the major difference, obviously.