@gallois reminds me of the old english expression ‘educated beyond his intelligence’ :)
A lot of people with great degrees in pure disciplines e.g. maths, or PhDs in just about anything, cannot drive a car with a manual gearbox, cannot put a screw into a wall, etc.
For flying, and to enjoy it, one needs something “in between”.
About once a year I have a nightmare that I have gone back to a university to do a PhD, and it ends in the same way as my real univ time ended: a bright warm sunny day, and a realisation that actually I don’t have to hand in any more stupid assignments and can just walk away from it all (but without a PhD) 
My point was going even further:
Many pilots won‘t admit, but flying is extremely simple! It‘s like riding a bycicle: You don‘t need to know anything about gyroskopic effects to be able to perfectly ride a bike – and most people who are actually quite good a riding bikes won‘t be able to explain the physics behind it.
Same with flying: It‘s a quite simple practical skill you need to learn. Nothing at all in between. Yes, if you go IFR you need to learn some phrases in addition and how to fill a flightplan but again, very simple and quite straight forward.
if you go IFR you need to learn some phrases in addition and how to fill a flightplan but again, very simple and quite straight forward.
You need way more comprehension to configure a modern IFR GPS, and all the stuff that goes with that. Sure, there are probably loads of people flying IFR tourers, ignoring most of the panel and flying with just a tablet; there used to be an SR22 based here which was only ever flown like that.
Some level of intuition for the principles is needed.
OTOH, one can get a CPL/IR while being pretty well disconnected from any aspect of the physical world, and gradually one gets into it, in a 2 pilot cockpit. Not particularly enjoyable however, according to some I have known who did it.
I have not seen any connection with day job and flying. Not even day job and homebuilding (of aircraft). It can also be seen from another perspective. People having done the same education and have similar jobs, usually have vastly different hobbies. This is everything from singing in a choir to base jumping, and some do both of those
However, I think there are other correlations. Really good aerobatics pilots often also are good in technical sports, such as downhill skiing, ski jumping or rally, motocross and so on. Good glider pilots are also good sailors. A good private pilot is what? good at driving an old Volvo 245 below the speed limits, on straight and level roads without getting bored? 
I think there are other factors at play. Flying an airplane is not difficult. The difficult part is enjoying it (certified aircraft in CAS) without being utterly fed up of bureaucratic nonsense. You have to like rules and regulations to some extent. Very few do, at least on a hobby basis, so most private pilots fly non certified aircraft outside CAS.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Same with flying: It‘s a quite simple practical skill you need to learn. Nothing at all in between.
Yes and no. You’re right of course when it comes to pure stick and rudder skills, but that’s not all there is to it. For example, we all know that if you overshoot the turn from base to final, you can’t just press the rudder pedal to get back to the final approach track . You have to make a coordinated turn, otherwise you’re very close to a stall/spin accident. This is much easier to remember and avoid if you actually know why it is dangerous.
There are lots of little things like that which are important. They are much easier to remember if you know the theory behind them.
Then there also things like TEM (sorry!).
LeSving wrote:
A good private pilot is what? good at driving an old Volvo 245 below the speed limits, on straight and level roads without getting bored?
I actually felt that learning to fly improved my skills as a car driver – particularly in planning ahead.
How about almost none.
I knew a retired airline pilot back in the 90s through aerobatics. He had a grade 6 education. Got into the airlines via some cargo flying, ended up as a captain for CP Air on DC8s in the 60s, retired in the 90s on 767s. Did long haul almost exclusively, said he had 2000 transatlantic trips by the time he retired.
The father of the farmers next to where I grew up didn’t have much more. He flew in WWI (combat), WWII (ferry), interwar (mostly fire patrol in the canadian wilderness), post WWII (his own charter operation), and finally transport for the DEW line construction in the 50s. Managed to navigate in the Artic via sextant and stars and seat of the pants, died in his bed in the 70s.
3 years ago my then 16 year old daughter decided to do her PPL. She was working through the theory and at one point asked me “daddy, what’s a spark plug?”. She managed to go solo at 13hours on the standard UK PA28 flying school plane.
So you don’t even need to finish high school. In fact, you don’t even need to start it. You don’t even have to know what a spark plug is.
Malibuflyer wrote:
My impression is that this thread says more about the members of this forum – esp. how they see themselfs and how they want to be seen by the outside – than about the requirements for flying.
If that is aimed at me, just for the record, I have no degree whatsoever. I have gymnasium (Maturity) and thereafter did flight training up to CPL IR and frozen ATPL. Academically I am a total pedestrian but I have a big interest in many things.
Formal education is one thing, interest and self-education another.
I stand by my statement, that more important than whatever diplomas you may have is the willingness and ambition to learn and to absorb information whereever you can. And that goes for any field, not only aviation.
Flying per se is a very technical thing. People like Chuck Yeager (who btw did pretty much what I said, he took his exceptional talent and added what he was missing to succeed by hard work while in school and formation to test pilot, he describes that vividly in his memoirs) are the best proof of that. He had a talent he nutured and consequently thrived on it by making a lot of right decisions. He claimed he was never interested to go the astronaut way, because he rightly felt that it would curtail what he loved to do best: Flying aeroplanes.
gallois wrote:
We can agree that English is the universal language, but as for every educated person is supposed to understand it I think that is a very bold statement.
It is the language with the most publications and most widely spoken. Universal, I don’t know. In the end it is a choice as with any other language. If I want to have the source material in it’s original form, I have to learn it. Which, imho sounds worse than it is. I found learning languages at school cumbersome, but once exposed to them with just a good basics, it became fun. My French in school was absymal, I only learnt to speak it fluently by exposure during my time in Geneva. Again, it’s a choice and sometimes necessity. I needed it at my job then, today I would not have my current job without it. And I enjoy watching French movies and always have been a big fan of the franko-belgian comic’s scene, which would be at most half the fun reading those translated…. LaGaffe anyone? At the same time, watching British comedy translated doesn’t work either, nor Shakespeare.
I am awful at math, so I had to work hard to do the math part of flying to get my exams. And I was not talented enough to make it to the airlines, which was a blow at the time but absolutely correct. But that does not prevent me from having a great life and fun with aviation. There are enough bitter airline-rejects and life is to great to mull over sour grapes.
Airborne_Again wrote:
There are lots of little things like that which are important. They are much easier to remember if you know the theory behind them.
With good stick and rudder skills, you don’t need to remember technical aspects of flying. The notion that theoretical knowledge somehow can mitigate lack of “muscle memory” is highly dubious at best IMO. This is not the same as saying when training, you should learn also the theoretical aspects.
Airborne_Again wrote:
I actually felt that learning to fly improved my skills as a car driver – particularly in planning ahead.
Only natural. We are composite beings, a fusion of all prior experiences. That goes for all aspects of life.
