onb, I am sure you are right about the piece of paper, but if you had a piece of paper to remind you of all you needed to know before lunch today, then your cockpit would soon look like my great grandma's parlor
I am kinda surprised that trigonometry and simple vector mechanics seems such a black art to so many 'pilots AND navigators' ..., but then I guess there's more than one way of skinning a cat or landing an aeroplane thesedays - well that's what my great granny says when she discusses it with me
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Anyway, I am sure there's a few reading the thread who are grateful for the revision lessons on rules of thumb
I am sure what we see in this thread shows that with some parts of the syllabus at least, the ATPL Theory multichoice questions in the exams don't quite test understanding as rigorously as might be preferable.
We all know our angles at least. Personally I've then taught my kids to work out sine's, cosines and tangents from geometric first principles (right angle triangles - measure and calculate opposite/hypotenuse etc.) and plot them on a graph to get a better feel for it all - plot their own sine curve, get to know the shape of it, how the gradient reduces rapidly for those angles over 60 - they now associate the values with something they understand and can visualise in their mind's eye, rather than risk regurgitating poorly learned number lists incorrectly e.g. is it sine or cosine I need? Is sin60 .866 or is cos60 .5 ?? Is it sin or cos that is 0 at 0? And why's tan45 1?
Hopefully if they ever take to the air, and one day find themselves trying to make sense out of their Breitling watchface bezel and crosswinds, they'll soon sort themselves out
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