How to Fly the B-25 Mitchell Bomber (1944) [video]
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I wonder if future spacecraft pilots will be saying the same thing in 75 years when "old SpaceX training videos" surface, or if everything will be automated by then and pilots will have gone the way of lighthouse keepers.
I would expect so. The areas where humans do better will get smaller and smaller.
We may end up being forced to develop self-flying aircraft, not necessarily because it's the right thing to do but simply because everyone expected it to happen and planned accordingly.
Military flying isn't like civilian flying. There are plenty of jobs where the machines are nowhere near a replacement, where nobody is even hinting that the humans will be replaced. SAR, tactical helicopter ops, mountain flying, special operations ... these are things that no machine is anywhere near understanding. Anyone here seriously believe that navy seals will be dropped off on some remote rooftop, blades feet from power lines, by a computer-flown helicopter?
There will always be a need for a few ridiculously good men and women in military aviation. But going into aviation thinking you'll end up in that position is like trying out for high-school basketball under the likely misapprehension that you're the next Michael Jordan.
Where will that wide talent pool come from, when most of the non-best of the best flying jobs are automated?
They gave up on this about a decade ago, because the average applicant for an air cadet slot now had better reflexes and hand-eye coordination than second world war fighter aces. (They might fail on the physical fitness requirement, but the average kid today is insanely good at keeping the gunsights on the target using a joystick compared to the average kid in the 1940s.)
It would at least have been nice to say why that is though. My guess: because the support people outside expect that one first?
Passengers and crew traditionally enter from doors on the left of an aircraft. So in many situations the right engine is kept running while the left is shutdown to accommodate passenger entry. You wouldn't start left, then right, only to shutdown left to board pax.
As for safety, one would never start an engine if it would be unsafe to start a different engine. You wouldn't start the right while someone was working around the left. A single crossed wire or slip of the finger is too high a risk to take.
The 'airline pilot' voice we all use these days comes from Chuck Yeager, and everyone trying to sound cool, but these guys sound always sound like they're telephoning the front desk.
I do not know if this is true.
But even without radio, why is it terrifying? Navigating by dead reckoning is pretty straight forward in good weather.
Edit: they also used celestial navigation. Many planes (until the 60s?) had astrodomes for the navigators.
Sadly, unlike some of the more popular YouTubers, he was unable to raise enough of a shitstorm on social media to draw the attention of anyone at Google who could look into it.
His channel is now on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/jeffquitney . Even though Vimeo sucks in numerous ways compared to YouTube -- no captions, no variable speed, no user comments -- they do seem to provide a valuable refuge for victims of the Google star chamber. It's well worth checking out for those who like this sort of thing.
HN actually operates the same way, albeit as an aggregator, and thus with greater subtlety.