[HardDrive]

Can you train a pilot? Or are pilots born?

I was reading the story about the Cogan pilots driving their plane into the ground....it bugged me. All the stories were about their lack of training. WTF? Maintaining airspeed? Really? Being a commercial pilot, you have to trained to maintain airspeed?. Dunno. That struck me as crazy. How could they not understand that...how could they not feel it?

I do not have a pilots license. Never owned an airplane. Never took a lesson, at least one that I paid for. But from the time I was in diapers, my butt was in the seat of a Piper Cub flying across the fields of Southern Michigan.

I'll spare you the rest of my nostalgic BS. Can you take just anyone and make them a pilot? Is that what the airline industry does? Your not training folks to trade stocks, or do surgery, or develop software...those task attract some brilliant folks. But thats not the point. Being a pilot (at least in my Piper Cub fantasy world) requires some 'feel' for it. Some understanding of the poetry.

So set me straight. Does a modern airline pilot simply work off an infinitely large flow chart that tells them the correct reaction to take given a certain set of inputs? Or do most of them 'get it'? If you switched off every instrument in 737, could the average pilot put the thing on the ground?

Sorry for the crazy ramble, but I still remember my grandfather killing the engine of his Cub a mile above the cornfields of Michigan, and just drifting with nothing but the sound of the wind and our laughter....and I end up contemplating these odd issues....forgive me.