Ah,
BEags, sadly you may be right - in part, at least. I have fond memories of tickling your recptacle with my probe
- and then descending to carry out more interesting tasks lower down
.
But the RAF became far too trivial and beuraucratic when I was on the ground, which was too much of the time in later years. Despite a dalliance with the display world, the attractions of spending my working life in the air, and my non-flying life at home, were - and still are - too strong to deny. The flying is routinely boring - as was the AAR and AT stuff in the RAF, for the most part - but there are occasional bursts of excitement to keep the blood pressure high enough to worry the docs! And, perhaps surprisingly, there is sufficient opportunity for artistic interpretation and expression in a fully manual approach to some of the world's airports. Even with no problems, the workload in a two-crew large aircraft can be very high, and there is still considerable satisfaction to be had from doing it well. With a few emergencies, the workload is phenomenal, and certainly the equal of anything I experienced in old-tech multi-crew aircraft of yore. And yet most of the routes I fly are still 3 crew (one is 4).
I also still enjoy life down route. The advantage of working for a scheduled longhaul airline is that min-time groundstops don't fit with the schedules, both from the daily timings and the flight time limitations points of view. So it's not necessarily anywhere near as bad as you fear. However, low-cost shorthaul may be another story - but then boredom is probably the least of those guys' worries....