Originally Posted by
mad_jock
Flying is a vocational qualification not academic. So what bits do you miss out of a degree to fit in the vocational bit. I can't think of anything that could have been trimmed from my Mech Eng course apart from Economics but that was only an hour a week in 1st year.
It's difficult at the best of times, and the people who construct degree programmes have to fight constantly to get the balance right. One year of maths or two? How far do you take the aerodynamics? What about the materials content? - composites are becoming more prevalent, but to make space what metallurgy do you take out? And how about general aeronautical knowledge? Writing skills?
Yes I know in our acredited Degrees we had to go to the workshops and fanny around with welding, machining and other such hands on engineering type things. But we wern't trained to be good at it just have exposure to the methods.
This is a constant battle again. The practices in manufacturing and maintenance keep getting more and more complex - is manual welding really relevant any more? How about some maintenance tasks?
You're absolutely right of-course that all of this is about basic exposure, not about competence - other people in other trades will get that (whilst getting their own light taste of graduate-type education.
I can see the point of an Aero getting up to say solo but the ATPL theory is utterly useless. It would be like training Mech Engs up to be able to weld a occluded stainless 9g or Machine an engine block from a billet.
I did ATPL theory (well, CPL technically, but there's not much in it), but much later. And I've found it very useful - but realistically, during or just after my first aero-eng degree would not have been the right time for it. On the other hand, had I know that material was available a couple of years later when I first started as a young flight test engineer, it might well have been very useful.
I must admit though the Language skills combo I am quite happy with. Certainly on my course the languages were only taken in the elective slots when the rest of us were doing the application type courses.
Similarly on mine, and personally I took the view that languages were something I could learn by many routes, and any time later.
But the core course and subjects were the same. If the course was setup so that to do the languages you missed out on core subjects it would be pants.
This is also true with the accredited aero-eng + flying degrees. It is the fringe stuff that makes way, not the engineering core. Note that I refer to the aero-eng degrees, (BEng or MEng), not the BA or BSc variants.
If your going to train to be an Engineer do it.
Yes, but I'll maintain that some flying knowledge (the accredited eng+pilot degrees go to solo or NPPL generally) is definitely beneficial in an aero-engineer. Similarly, many universities have auto-engineer students running and racing "formula student" racing teams.
[quote]If you want to train as a Pro Pilot take the vocational course.
Ultimately, I do have to agree with you - I did the vocational course, enjoyed it, and passed everything full time. But it's a very different beast to my degree, complementary, but doing it at the same time as my BEng would have been the wrong time. (I actually did it just after finishing my PhD).
If you want to follow in Neil Armstrongs or Genghis footsteps you build your knowledge and skill sets up on firm foundations. A degree which is a taster of several subjects/displines which takes you to a low knowledge base in all of them isn't a firm foundation.
Yes - ish. You will eventually, if you want to do the sort of odd-job-career that I and that Professor Armstrong chappie have pursued, you'll need really solid education
and training in both engineering and maths. Pretty much all test pilots nowadays have engineering or science degrees, most often aeronautical engineering, and very often to masters level (and it's amazing how many high level aeronautical engineers are accomplished pilots).
For that matter, for how many years did engineering or science students in the UK join the UAS and learn military flying to a high level? And how many of those ended up pretty senior in one sphere or another? Quite a lot.
Although a lack of technical competence seems to be an advantage in a great number of industry's for gaining a managment position.
Part of that is that the functional technical leaders tend to get really resentful of anybody above them trying to tell them how to do their jobs - so eventually the most senior managers give up trying.
A way around that is for a senior manager to show a lot of humility and demote themself once in a while and do a relatively junior job in their discipline to maintain contact and some grasp of organisation reality. Middle managers however, really hate that - an airline captain doesn't like having his MD as FO, nor does a crew chief want the maintenance director in overalls doing wire locking. Universities solve this quite elegantly by having even the most senior professors engage with the grass roots: so a head of School or Faculty (possibly responsible for a couple of hundred staff and several thousand students) still is expected to teach a few classes and write the occasional research paper themselves; airlines often have management pilots fly a couple of sectors each month, whilst the services still expect basic front line skills of a senior officer - but not all industries, or managers, do this sort of thing.
G