Flight Engineers

[cb9002]

Out of curiosity, do flight engineers still exist on commercial jets?

Are they pilots with specialized training, or a different career path? Do they do things that a pilot couldn't, or they just concentrate on the mechanical side of things?

I was wondering because in this post (http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=86619), one reply said that in the Belfast, the pilot would call torque and the engineer would set it.

Thanks