gloopy

IMO the "I'm a little molecule of air/drop of fuel/electron/etc" nostalgic 3 hour build me an airplane oral/systems knowledge that some still seem to desperately pine for isn't what the industry needs to be focusing on anyway. Especially in an era of +/- zero point something accuracy, RVSM, PRM, RNAV operating environments where everything is an amalgamation of countless thousands of pages spread across the one place right place Indiana Jones warehouse of knowledge. Having all the schematics and memorizing the busses in your head may very well build character but is a colossal waste of mental hard drive space compared to things of far higher significance in the modern operating environment.

No one ever accidentally attempts a TOFU because they can't draw schematics of electrics and hydraulics and build the flap system on a whiteboard. In a world of little room for error in procedures and scripts and triggers and a couple numbers on a WDR that might make a huge difference even though you can go years without needing to use it...that kind of stuff is what we need to spend more training time on. We have better QRH/EICAS/ECAM/etc, searchable manuals and team expansion now than ever. Fleet specific frat initiation hazing is a good riddance relic of the past.

That said, I would still prefer an actual (practical) ground school to the self study method. Especially when its concurrent with having to know another fleet at the same time. If were going to do it this way, we should at least have a hard date a couple weeks prior to showing up for training. Many POI's for a long time had strict "training contamination" perspectives where the day you started training on one you were done on the other. Others permitted "dual qual" (or worse).