On May 22, 9:26*pm, "Maxwell" luv2^fly99@cox.^net wrote:
"Tina" wrote in message

...

I doubt many ATPs toiled as long for their rating as long as
candidates for doctorates have in the halls of academia. *But it does
take different skill sets in most cases, doesn't it?

Maybe it's just me, but this seems like an interesting question. Anyone
would have to admit the written and practical exams for and ATP, are
certainly know match when compared to a doctorate. But how can you weight
the knowledge gained from 2000 or 3000 flight hours, especially in the
variety of aircraft and flight conditions required for and ATP, with 200 or
300 college hours?

I think that, all things being equal, the academic will have an
advantage in the cockpit, because s/he will not only have a set of
rules to follow, but have fundamental understanding of why those rules
are applicable.

During my own ground school, there were several places during
instruction where knowledge of math and science was clearly
advantageous:

1. magnetos (induction)
2. carb ice (adiabatic cooling of condensate)
3. density/pressure altitude (ideal gas law)
4. course tracking in high crosswind (vectors)
5. balance and center of gravity (arms and moments)
6. compass error due to EMI (basic electrodynamics)
7. mixture enrichment and leaning (density of gases vs altitude)
8. VOR (electromagnetic radiation)
9. load factor (basic trigonometry, Newton's law for circular motion)
10. vestibular disorientation (physiology of inner ear)
11. gyroscopic precession (torque, Newton's Law)

An electrical engineer will, I think, have an easier time remembering
basic radio frequencies by virtue of the fact that s/he knows what a
frequency really is. Inn ground school, I tested hypothesis by asking
the class (and the instructor), if the frequency was in megahertz or
kilohertz. There was silence, as no one knew. This difference might
seem inconsequential and irrelevant until a pilot is asked to recite
all the standard frequencies. The EE, I think, might have an easier
time. The reason is context. When someone utters an RNAV frequency as
a number, the EE might think of many things, but often there is a
visualization. Maybe he thinks about the humps of sine waves. Maybe he
thinks about where it lies in spectrum, a few MHz beyond the FCC limit
on FM in the USA. Whatever he thinks, he will have something to think
about. To some others, the number is just a number, surround by a
black void that provides no crutch for recollection.

Then there is the E6-B. It makes a lot more sense to someone who
understands the fundamentals of what they are doing than following a
learned procedure, which is why I stopped following the "do this, then
do that" instructions, and examine the thing and thought about why it
works, what relationships exist between the scales etc.

So I regard my flight training as mostly a cerebral experience, with
the instructor filling in the parts that are not found in books.

-Le Chaud Lapin-