I was so much older then ...
Back when I had about 1 000 hours and knew so much more than I do now, I was working as a flight instructor.
I could fly the Cessna 150/152 right to its limits, so that I could land it fairly short, just past the 'numbers', but a fellow instructor told me that he could 'land on the numbers'. I didn't understand how he could manage that trick, so that I asked him to show me.
This really didn't matter in practical terms, given that you needed more runway to depart than to land, but I was just curious to see what I was missing.
It turned out the way to manage this was to hang the little Cessna on its prop, just above Vs, and then 'chop' the throttle so that the aircraft quit flying just as it reached the threshold. When you get it exactly right it lands with a gentle thump, a little pressure on the brakes, and there you are. I was impressed! We stopped right on the numbers. I just said, "Durn! Who showed you how to do this?'
'My instructor. Why?'
I asked my friend if we could now go out in the practice area; I had something else I wanted to see. Okay, so off we went.
Once there I asked for a demonstration of slow flight. Soon we were motoring around with full flaps just above Vs, when he had the aircraft under perfect control, albeit with a hell of a lot of rudder input. Then I asked him, 'Hey! What's that over there?' pointing so that he had to look over his left shoulder. Of course, when he did that he relaxed on the rudder pedals just enough that we went immediately into an uncommanded spin. As we were coming through 180 degrees of roll I said, 'I have the flaps,' raising them, since one is not supposed to spin that type with the flaps down. He was still trying to figure out why the view thourgh the windscreen was now of the ground where just a second ago all we could see was sky.
He made a normal spin recovery, but he was asking all the while, 'What did you do there? What was that?' I just told him we could talk about this once we had landed, so that I wanted to go back now.
Once we got back and had put the aircraft away we went to have some Dr Pepper in a quiet place, when I explained that I hadn't touched anything, that the Cessna had spun because he had asked it to by relaxing that right rudder he had been holding, once I had distracted him.
Then I pointed out that we had been in the same configuration at 30 feet on approach, so that we had been perfectly set up for the classic 'stall-spin in the pattern' sort of accident that we always found so hard to understand. Well, in terms of how a reasonably skilful pilot could let himself be caught out in such an obvious way. So now we knew; it was just that human failure to 'connect the dots.' My colleague knew how to land short, he knew how to do slow flight and (a requirement in those days) he knew how to do spins and spin recoveries. But he had overlooked the way all of these things could combine. He was focussed on one task so that he overlooked some of the other things he was also asking the airplane to do.
I might have read the same book about aerobatics, but I went out with an instructor to try barrel rolls. Just as well, because I sure screwed up the first one I tried, when the instructor took the T-67 away from me and sorted out the mess I had made. If I had been by myself trying this I might well have done some damage there.