I can't speak for anybody else, but with 3 pilots licences, 2 aeronautical engineering degrees, an average sized brain and a job that can require me to use any of that knowledge (and then some!) most days - I am constantly on catchup about theory and very regularly needing to look up, refresh, rethink a lot of it.
And if I'm honest, also pretty unsympathetic of anybody in either science or aviation (as I work in the overlap between the two) who really thinks that "this is irrelevant, I really don't need to know it". In this hellishly complicated field of aviation - we will NEVER know as much as it is beneficial to know. Absolutely none of us.
So, some point this week when I have time, I'll have my CPL met notes out, and if that doesn't work look deeper, to try and understand why I nearly got caught yesterday in a sea fog that formed in a 20+ knot south Westerly starting a few miles off the south coast, was advancing about half the wind speed, dissipating over the mainland but not the Isle of Wight, and all vanished an hour or two before dusk.
Which fortunately did not give me a serious problem, but had I not seen and thought about it building ahead of me, and not been prepared to do as much analysis as I could in flight, and significantly change my planned routing, might have seriously screwed my Sunday up.
And, strangely enough, I had no expectation of needing any knowledge about sea fog on Sunday, nor any material in the cockpit that allowed me to look it up. So I was totally reliant upon what was in my head.
G
Last edited by Genghis the Engineer; 10th Apr 2017 at 11:30.