We have a couple of married friends who are quite a bit younger than us. Both of them are in the reserves and both are test pilots for Boeing. My wife said that they ought to come over and fly one of our airplanes sometime. She thought that maybe they would enjoy getting back to the basics. But they said that they wouldn't be comfortable flying our airplanes because they both started flying after joining the military and had never flown non-computerized aircraft. At first we thought that they were joking, because our planes are extremely easy to fly and we are sure that they would have no difficulties with very minimal instruction. But they were actually serious.
I have always felt that my years of hang gliding in the mountains around here made me much more aware and able to visualize what to expect from the wind and weather. And my years of flying my homemade ultralight which had engine monitoring gauges but no flight instruments at all gave me a better “seat of the pants” feel for a small plane than others who have all been trained to watch their flight instruments closely at all times.
MY favorite book on flying is of course, Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying by Wolfgang Langewiesche. If you are not a pilot and you want to actually understand how flying an airplane really works then it is the book you should read.
Flying commercial airplanes to me, a non- pilot, seems to be the easiest kind of flying. I cannot understand why you need complicated computer systems.
The plane takes off and lands on , to me, an overly long, wide, well maintained runway. Some of these runways are 10-12,000 feet long.
The take offs and landings are very conservative so as not to alarm the passengers.
The plane in fligth makes very few if any sharp turns or dives or ascents when in flight.
When it lands it takes a long approach and the pilots get assistance from the tower telling them what runaway to land on , and what the weather is and whether to land or not.
Why this type of flying would need complicated computer systems is beyond me.
This not flying a fighter jet type of flying.
Or the other extreme ,flying a Pitt Special doing incredible aerial stunts. - Tom