The power issue doesn't wash. Can anybody here remember the last time a calculator was unusable due to dead batteries? One can make that argument for a laptop or a PDA, most certainly, but one would not use either of those for a critical application on the ground and one would not use either of them for anything (when running on batteries, anyway) when airborne.
It's true airline pilots don't normally do their own planning. I have flown with quite a few and none of them (noting that very few of those who fly GA fly
IFR GA) would be able to file an IFR flight plan that's Eurocontrol acceptable, and they haven't got a clue about IFR issues like oxygen, and where to get smart weather data via the internet. The place to look for real "on the hoof" flight planning ability is corporate and private bizjet pilots; most of them have to do everything alone. None of them use the slide rule.
I think the continued teaching of the slide rule is positively
reducing safety. For a start, the large proportion of the PPL ground school (none of which is mandatory anyway) gets blown away on this subject, and could be better spent teaching more useful stuff, like how to work out a real long route across a bit of Europe.
Next, nobody is taught how it actually works. I used a straight slide rule at school since in the late 1960s (this was in Eastern Europe, not the UK) and understood how it works: adding/subtracting logs and doing the antilog gives you multiplication and division. But present day PPL students never get to understand this very simple principle. They never realise that the calculator side is just a general purpose multiplication/division function, which just happens to have marks in common places like litre/gallon conversion factors. They think it is some special purpose aviation device, which magically converts one thing to another. So when they get a duff answer because they line up the marks wrong
(which is really easily done) they never realise it. I also think most of them never suss out that the wind side works out the trig for the wind triangle, and when and why iteration is required to get the right answer.
There is so much stuff which would be more usefully taught in the PPL, which would help turn out a PPL holder who can go somewhere interesting. Instead, they learn a whole load of rubbish.
Most intelligent people that walk into a flying school take one look at this quaint old nonsense, smile politely and walk straight out of the door.
Droopy - if you can fly a heli to 1 degree on say a 20nm leg, you are indeed a robot
