On the touchy ( forgive me ) subject of hand flying there was a time some here will recall, when a lot of training was done in the airplanes, some of it at night. Circling approaches, recovery from unusual attitudes, stalls and steep turns, offsets and every conceivable situation that might be encountered before all the airports had good approach aids and long enough runways. Hands on, heads up stuff you could never forget because it scared the daylights out of you. Behind us now, with a few exceptions in remote parts of the world, and good riddance to it. Safe and sanitary simulation, nowhere near as stimulating but a lot less dangerous, is here to stay. But it is no substitute for experience, and that brings up something else that has changed. Flying time and flying experience are no longer the same thing. Five thousand hours at one time would have exposed you to several difficult and trying situations in almost any job outside the airlines and some within. Today, five thousand hours in the right seat of a scheduled carrier with modern well maintained equipment may seem like enough time, but it may not be very much experience at all. I don’t have humble opinions, but the one I do have favors intelligent acceptance of the inevitable AI, not the expensive step in the wrong direction of trying to make new pilots more like the old ones. The teachable autopilot is right around the corner, able to be programmed with more experience than a room full of pilots. Driving airplanes is not what it used to be, nor should it be.