As technology marches inexorably forward and cockpit automation becomes ever more capable (Garmin Autoland?), I suppose it's inevitable that piloting your average modern GA aircraft will become a lot less complex than it used to be. FADEC is available in many trainers now where the t
hrottle levers of old are marked 'power' instead with comments like the one below (from discussion in another forum around the best time to go full fine prior to landing) perhaps understandably justified if your only goal is to train pilots for an Automation Management role in the cockpit of a fly-by-wire Airbus.. Am I the only one a little concerned by this trajectory?
I'm just surprised that in the age that has reached battery powered planes, anyone has to manually manage prop and mixture. It is obscene that both are not controlled automatically regardless that people perceive it as a simple operation. Pilots need fewer tasks to free time for other things.
"Obscene"? What "other things"?!?? Just push a button at the start of the runway and fly around Fat, Dumb and Happy, with our eyes firmly inside gazing on all the pretty colours instead of outside looking for traffic (that's ATC's job)? and with our ears finely attuned to a the latest Spotify playlist rather than the sound of the engines and airflow (or the radios) waiting for Garmin Autoland to bring the plane in for touchdown to the amazement of our passengers??
It seems to me that all aeroplanes, no matter how large or small, complex or simple, operate in the same parcels of air that can be everything from benign clear blue skies one moment to ugly storms and icing the next and to the same set of physics, yet the subtle message of cockpit designs like the Icon A5 (to pick but one) and the latest movies and TV shows is that "flying is easy - it's just like driving car!", breeding pilots of the present and future with very little skill or appreciation for the complexities of operating a fast-moving object in three dimensions if something (like a prop hub governor) goes wrong.