Where the hell did you get THAT idea from, bushy?!?
Pilots are good at drinking beer, telling stories about themselves and occasionally fly aeroplanes.
More seriously though, when you compare pilots to people in other lines of work, you find a few interesting things
Pilots are mostly people who are oriented towards visual communications channels.
Manuals put them to sleep, briefings are too long if they go over a half hour.
Thats why you put us in simulators and SHOW us situations and concepts. Select us via psychometric tests which have little pictures to choose from. Draw diagrams of hydraulic systems instead of just writing how they work.
We spend our day chatting to our flight deck colleagues, not writing them memos.
About the only place where you find pilots regularly putting their thoughts into writing is either here or on toilet walls (but only if it is a female toilet wall, and it is rude or funny).
Pilots are also generally people who prefer seeing immediate results, and prefer to work on problems that well defined and the results of their work are right in front of them in the here-and-now.
Long term considerations are usually limited to .. next job, airline job if they dont have one, the next bigger airplane, the next bigger paycheck, the next overnight.
This is not a criticism. It is just that we are different from say, a scientist who might be working on a problem that is extremely complex like working out how to get molecules to act as transistors.... all tests must be well set up, with statistically measureable results, the results written up and published to the scientific community... etc. That is for people who are prepared to work on little bits of a problem that might take up to 20 years to develop a practical technology.
Not a job I would be interested in.
Enjoy the madness on Pprune, just don't expect responsible and considered responses all the time!