At the ATP level? American pilots are better.
At the PPL level? American pilots are worse.
America will let anyone with $20,000 and a dream get their private certificate and buzz around in see & avoid. If you’ve got a few braincells they’ll even let you fly IFR. But if you want to get paid to fly, let alone get paid to fly a jet, you are going to have a rigorous standard applied to you while ALSO having had to survive 1500 hours in the GA world without issue. Over 90% of US pilots with airline ambitions get weeded out between first solo and ATP.
Meanwhile Europe filters people with a battery of theory and exams before they even start training. The benefit of that is that you can go to the right seat of a jet in about 10% the time it takes Americans, but the flip side of that is you miss out on that foundational GA experience. Do jet pilots really need to be well rounded aviators? Debatable, the FAA says yes and the EASA says no.
Ironically the US military lands firmly on the side of the EASA on this one. Any CFI who has had a 30,000 hour former-military, former-airline pilot who needs to go back and get his ASEL PPL in order to fly the Cirrus he just bought can testify to that.
