Gravy:
I guess that's my point though. A lot of those things you mentioned you pick up through training, which certainly isn't to say that it's not good stuff beforehand.
One of the AWs on cruise has a hard time w/ numbers. The guy is an awesome AW and aircrewman, not to mention that I really like the guy, but he just has trouble keeping numbers straight in his head. We all have our issues...I have a really hard time memorizing things verbatim.
Anyway, there would be a couple of times that we'd be heading back to the boat at the end of a flight, and we'd take turns each flight estimating what airspeed we needed to fly in order to be overhead right at the time we got green deck. I know the pointy nose guys have to do that everytime, but ours is a little different in that we're literally rolling final and over the deck, not just pushing over. But I digress. The point was that at first, our AW would have a serious SWAG, but when we'd tell him some cheats to use, he picked it up pretty quick (it doesn't hurt that he's one smart MF, too). After awhile, his estimate and what the computer said were usally pretty close.