Originally Posted by
Gordomac
PDR will , no doubt, suggest more "hubris", perhaps ,even ,psychotic tendency towards a more envied group . Touch of the green-eye coming through in your posts dear chap but it has been a humorous, light hearted exchange for my Saturday morning read. Thanks.
You may be surprised to hear that I agree with you - I say "may" because anyone who actually reads what I've posted rather than assumed I'd said something else will already have seen it.
I am not, and do not, say that people with degrees make better pilots because piloting doesn't need the things needed to gain a degree, and gaining a degree doesn't give you the things you need to do piloting. It should be patently obvious that therefore an ATPL (or whatever) is not the equivalent of a degree, and nor is a degree the equivalent of an ATPL - they are completely different things.
I have degrees (and I'm a chartered engineer) but I only took flying as far as a PPL-IMC. I haven't held a stick for over 20 years and haven't been P1 for more than 25 - these are the life choices I made. So any of those who carried on to CPL, full IR or have more hours or even those who are just more current than me are undoubtedly better pilots. Just as with by education, expertise and experience I will probably be the better engineer. Do I envy those who are better pilots? Certainly on some days I do. I have often found myself striving to mitigate the institutional stupidity of the MoD* and on those days I deeply envy anyone who flies for a living. But I don't see myself as superior or inferior to these people - we are not in the same field so it would be an apples/monkey-wrenches comparison.
All I have done is disagree with the repeated assertion by some that "my ATPL is equivalent to a degree" because, as agreed by many of the ATPLs on here, such a statement is what is technically termed "utter twaddle" - as would be the natural corollary "a degree is the equivalent of an ATPL".