My flying time has been split between VFR and IFR and my fire fighting time was about fifteen years of the over fifty I flew.I googled you and it appears that your 50 years of flying has been mostly fire fighting, flying Catalina's, etc. Is that correct? In other words, most of your flying has been VFR type flying.
I received my first instrument rating in the early 1960's ( as a point of interest the first thing we had to do at the start of our IFR flight test was be able to read Morse code identifiers as diled up by the inspector } and held it until I retired in 2005.I am curious, have you ever held an instrument rating?
Yes in many different countries, my first real high density airport was nightly courrier flights into Chicago's O'Hare airport in a Beech 18 single pilot in the sixtes.Have you flown into high density airports?
Well as to multi crew environment I started flying for Austin Airways in 1968 and then flew for Mobil Oil in 1970, their SOP's were first class. Also I have over five thousand hours flying DC3's mostly in the arctic and far north and for sure a lot of that time was IFR and for sure it was not single pilot.Have you flown sophisticated airline type aircraft? Have you worked in an SOP environment, a multi-pilot crew environment?
As to sophisticated aircraft ( I am not sure exactly what you consider sophisticated. ) However I guess the closest I came to flying one as a full time job it was flying a corporate 690B Turbo Commander which was my favourite airplane performance wise.
I never flew for an airline simply because that type of flying did not really interest me even though the pay can be very good in that segment of aviation. I made a reasonable pay in speciality flying ( Ag. Flying both fixed and rotary wing / Fire Suppression/ and Flying in the air show circuit in Europe flying the Pitts S2B and the Super Decathalon. Those three types of flying took up 36 years of my career and I was seldom bored with the flying,
Why do you feel I have disdain for professional airline pilots?I am trying to figure out where you are coming from with your disdain for professional airline pilots and those with anything greater than a high school education.
As to anyone with greater than high school education what makes you feel I have disdain for them?
All I have said is one does not need greater than high school to be able to safely and skillfully fly any airplane including an airline category airplane.