El Desperado and GonvilleBromhead,
I hear what you're saying. And, if you continue the argument a bit further, we actually agree on the fundamentals. I guess, after thinking about your comments, what I probably mean is that I wouldn't want to fly with a pilot who was
only capable of learning 75% of the syllabus.
I did a degree in Software Engineering. In the years I've been working in the IT industry, I've never once had to use anything that I learnt on the compilers course, or the graphics course, or the speech recognition course.
However, for the exams in these subjects, I not only needed to know the syllabus for the course - I also needed to use my brain. The graphics course taught me the equations for drawing straight lines, curves, etc on a computer screen. The exam gave me real-life scenarios, which I hadn't encountered during my studies, and forced me to apply my knowledge to these scenarios to determine how best to draw something new. Likewise, the image processing exam presented me with scenarios I hadn't encountered before, and asked which image processing techniques could best be used in these scenarios.
I now work in the financial markets industry. I have had very little training in financial markets, but it's the skills (
not the knowledge) which I gained at university which enable me to adapt my previous IT experience and use it in the financial markets industry.
(This, by the way, is in complete contrast to the Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, etc. certification exams, which are purely knowledge-based, and could be passed by any monkey with a sufficiently good memory. When I'm recruiting, I will always ignore any of these technology-specific "qualifications", because I know that all the information candidates will have learnt on the course is available in industry-standard text-books. It's intelligence, and not just knowledge, which will get people a job working for me.)
Of course student pilots are going to forget most of the syllabus as soon as they walk out of the exam. Unlike IT, remembering
some things is quite important, because there are times when you don't have access to, or time to refer to, text books. But when people want a list of all the exam questions before they go into the exam, they are asking for the ATPL to be turned into a Microsoft-style exam, rather than a test of intelligence.
Unlike the IT equivalent, there are reasons why pilots might need to know what a rain-ice triangle is after the exam - if they fly into one and need to get out, for example - although there are plenty of questions out there on subjects which there is no reason why a pilot would need to remember. But it is taking the knowledge you have,
and proving that you can apply it to new situations, which is what you are being asked to do when you encounter questions on subjects which are not
directly covered by the syllabus.
As for the question: it would be a very enthusiastic captain who would fly the whole of the flight, approach and landing - surely he would "allow" the F/O to do the more boring parts of the flight such as programming that auto-pilot en-route. So that immediately rules out D. I'd go for C.
FFF
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