Markoz wrote on Jul 19^th, 2011 at 2:16am:

LOU wrote on Jul 19th, 2011 at 2:12am: The course was five months long back in the early days, now it's just a few weeks and out the door. This worries me Lou! You make it sound like they don't learn enough about the aircraft these days. :o

Don't worry, Mark, they are first of all more complex now. Even the FCMO docs represent that. The full thing B707 has a few hundred pages, the newer ones easily go up to 5000 or so.
You have more systems, more details, more applied science.
And also, look how complicated and optimized the surrounding of all plane operations has become. The somehow romantic tendencies are gone and the management and logistics dictate a very tight schedule, stressing the need for new skills too, way off any technical basis. The whole crew management thingy is just one there.

And the other part in training personnel are of course costs. With airlines looking for pilots to be certified within the shortest amount of time, they also stress all regulations to be as close to the 'only as much as he needs, not more' point as can be.
Money business, not safety business. The governmental regulations hold back this trend as best as they can of course, but they aren't free of influences at all.

But I'd say that modern simulators (not FSX, the big things) helped a lot in pilots education when compared to the older times.
On the very first years of commercial flying, the pilots were not only pilots but also the engineers or at least very proficient co-workers there. This nowadays is hard to achieve in a normal educational cycle.
So while you would of course learn up to date things as a new pilot now, it would also be as reduced as can be to allow a fast progress.
Luckily, they still ask the question 'do we have to improve training?' after some incidents happened.

Look at other parts of the business world and how e. g. academic backgrounds got reduced to the very focus of a part of science, to "allow" a fast migration into the productive regime. This did not happen intentionally from the student's side, but of course came from the industry, asking for fresh blood, fast.  :o

So it may happen that this new Bachelor is an expert at one part of that science he has been taught about, but doesn't even know about the existence of other 'hot spots'.