BTW
I think LB’s conflated learned professionals with all professionals.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “profession” to mean, among other things, a “vocation or calling, esp[ecially] one that involves some branch of advanced learning or science”. Examples given of the use of the word “professional” are: “the military profession; a carpenter by profession”.
Thus, according to the COD, one may be a “professional boxer” or a “professional golfer”.
One may also be a member of “the oldest profession – prostitution”.
And one may be a member of “the learned professions – divinity, law or medicine”.
Pilots who are paid to be pilots are doubtless thereby members of a profession, but not a learned profession.
Yet we should take a leaf out of Father Galapagos’s divine professional pilots good book, and forgive LB, for he nose not what he done.