Tanker299 wrote: ↑Tue Oct 07, 2025 1:55 pm
I fail to understand the comment about “the CF having tons of applicants so they can be picky” if they need to hire people from another country…. Training delays? So you come to the CF and just jump into a seat? No check ride or training on how the CF does it? Lots of folks have previous CF experience, I even have my para wings. The flight instructors are civilians for a lot of training… I work with folks that portage was their first job. I know lots of folks who can stuff a chopper into places or fly the equivalent of low level close air support, heck I have done 100s of sorties… put loads on target and wore the queens wings. In some countries what I did is an Airforce job. So I don’t buy the argument that foreign folks can be trained easier other than maybe to fly a clapped out 188. There are guys with Herc, Electra and bell 412 type ratings in Canada. Now I dont really want to go back in but that’s not the point. It’s a farce and an ol boys club. The US does it all day long.
Do we even need an “airforce” anymore? Ditch the clapped out 188 and contract the transport stuff. Conair and Airspray were flying fire cats and A26s, maritime stuff is done by PAL and the coastguard is now a defence department thing with TC pilots doing shipborne landings. But what do I know.
A few things to address:
1. Foreign pilots - yes they still need to do the RCAF training and therefore take a slot away from someone coming in off the street. The difference is they come with valuable experience that means they can progress much more quickly to the senior flight leads / standards / instructor roles. They're more valuable than a new guy off the street - see para 3 below, they have much of these skills already.
2. Civilian flight instructors - The only civilian flight instructors are the Phase 1 instructors in Portage. That's only the initial ~20hrs, basically takes you to PPL solo standard with some extra (aerobatics, etc.) It's more about selection / weeding out unsuitable candidates than it is about actual instruction. Phase II, where the bread and butter of clearhood, instrument, navigation, formation, etc is taught is done almost exclusively by military instructors. There may be some civvies here but they're ex-military. Phase III, which is your conversion to helo/multi/jet depending on stream is also primarily military instructors, again potentially with some civilians that are ex-military.
3. Civvies doing Airforce jobs - it's not actually about the hands and feet. You can teach a monkey to fly, even at 50 feet contour flying on NVG in pitch black in close formation, though I guarantee no civvie pilots have even that level of experience. That's only 20% of what we do. It's the tactics. Does a civvie pilot flying 412s know the 5 steps of close combat attack procedures? How to communicate with a JTAC, do an attack team check-in, receive an AO update and understand the attack brief including all remarks and restrictions, understand weapons effects, ranges, beaten zones for different patterns, come up with an attack game plan, etc? How to integrate into busy airspace with live artillery gun target lines, ROZs, jets flying above the coordination level dropping ordinance? Does a civvie pilot know the intricacies of how to defend against an SA-15 in search / track / missile engagement modes? What about an SA-18? Do they know the difference? (spoiler alert, it's huge). I don't blame those who have never been exposed to it for not understanding everything that is involved - it's truly a "you don't know until you know" situation. Would someone with a civilian flying background find it easier to transition over? Sure. But they still require the training to learn all the things they haven't been exposed to. In the RCAF, a pilot does not just fly an aircraft - a pilot fights that aircraft as a weapons platform. This is the key difference.
I'll edit to add - RCAF pilots aren't the be-all, end all, I'm not trying to claim that. There are things civvie pilots can do that we simply aren't exposed to - long line slinging for one. Holy crap do I respect those guys who single pilot long line sling in mountainous terrain. I've done a long line with a 3 person crew, including a flight engineer conning me on, and I still found it difficult. I'll be the first to admit that a civvie pilot with the same number of hours is probably a better "hands and feet" pilot than I am. Not to say I couldn't learn it, just like a civvie pilot could learn all the stuff in para 3 above - but it demonstrates that the jobs are simply different. One can't simply take someone from one community and seamlessly move them over to another.
The US can do the off the street reserve thing - because they have the capacity to take that civvie pilot and train them. No-one steps directly from a 777 into an F22 and just does the job - they do the same training. And the US has the capacity to do this, unfortunately our small RCAF doesn't. And the juice isn't worth the squeeze to take training slots away from full time pilots in favour of the weekend warriors who only work a few days a month, aren't generally deployable on short notice, etc. I have a lot of respect for reserves but if one has to choose, a trained full timer is far more valuable than a part-timer.
