Thanks for your comments, I made plenty of mistakes at the time so am not viewing this as one sided, in fact the opposite until I joined the forum last year and found that other people had had similar treatment.

The biggest issue was that I was not politically savvy enough to know when to keep my mouth shut (what 19 year old does?) and being the only direct entrant on the course meant that I was also the youngest by a long way.

In the long run, with 20:20 hindsight and all that it probably did me a favour…I view it as useful as a university degree, the beer was as cheap, I got paid a lot more than being at Uni, wore a flying suit every day, I got 130 hours in the back of a Wessex and a hell of a lot of life education, what more can a young man ask for? 😀