As LP Hartley so aptly put it, “ The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” In aviation one of those things was the acquisition of experience, mostly bad, obtained the hard way with everything on the line. You can’t train for it, simulate it or acquire it in a world that has ironed out most of the wrinkles that made pilots wary and cynical and competent in a crisis. Today, better airplanes, technology and systems don’t make better pilots but they do make flying safer. Pilots are not what they were in the past because they very seldom need to be. That is a good thing, even when it does not appear that way.