I agree; the CR-5 does the wind calcs too so basically does everything needed.

I didn't realise a CRP-5 was mandatory for the ATPL exams. Yeah, I bet all the BA pilots carry one ;)

that was my understanding as well.

And the answers by the CR-5 are slightly different to those by the CRP-5 and you guessed it both will be in the list of available choices.

BA pilots don't need to carry one to my knowledge but it is SOP in some airlines to carry one. I used to carry a small whizz wheel without the wind stuff for doing enroute fuel and fuel uplifts, I very rarely used it. I lost it and as the machine does the enroute fuel and a cheat sheet in the techlog does the fuel converstions I never replaced it.

How delightfully reassuring, darling. Not half as reassuring however as the dashing pilot with the great hair and oh such a well groomed upper class voice.

Carrying a CRP-5 on a jet is like watching one of those 1950s documentaries on aviation, when the hostesses wore proper short skirts and high heels.

What century is this?

Perhaps trainee pilots - who clearly are so immature that they need to further domonstrate those qualities - should do their exams using a quill pen and ink pot. Writing with such an instrument is clearly a skill which should not be lost:ugh:

On a serious side, the knowledge and skills applied using an electronic calculator are exactly the same as those applied using a manual flight computer. In fact, using modern technology is far more relevant when you take into account the reduced risk of error inherent in an electronic device and on line systems for flight planning as compared to protractor, ruler and wizzy wheel.

To be honest somefolk get on better with a whizz wheel than a calculator.

Being an engineer in a previous life a scientfic calculator was my prefered method and fastest as well. Some of the people on the brush up course it was the other way round they prefered the whizz wheel and got quicker/correct answers using it.

Some folk hate others its a god send. Can't win really.

Better tell me which airline they work for so I can avoid flying with it? Air France perhaps?

I've been an "engineer" all my life, and used the slide rule at school in the late 1960s so I am fully familiar with how it works. But that's where it belongs. No "engineer" I know uses one today. It's a multiplication/division device; that's all. The wind side of the aviation slide rules just does a geometric solution to the wind triangle, but you don't need to do that unless dead reckoning, which nobody does when flying somewhere "for real" today.

The reason we still have this antiquated device in the syllabus and in the exams is because the JAA material was finalised c. 1998, and was written by ex national Air Force navigators (and similar types) who were retired even before that date. Practically everybody who has been involved with today's ATPL exams had finished with aviation in all practical sense even before GPS came along in the late 1980s.

All of them will have a few :D

And we do use specialist slide rules when I worked as a mechnical engineer for working out loads and Ixx Iyy values of H beams, bolt loads etc on flanges. That was in 1998 and I can't see things changing much because it was a very quick easy way of getting the data you required. I still have my metric imperial converter for doing pressure pipe work for ASME codes.

Military use them for working out ranges, Artillery use them for firing solutions in case the electronics go tits up.

Slide rules arn't as dead as you think.