Modern aircraft are simply more demanding of high quality pilots and training excellence.
Whilst there is a global recession, airlines should take the opportunity to select only the very best. Those who are intelligent enough to understand the complexity and demands of modern aeroplanes - and who aren't so blinkered in their thinking that they don't understand that even something as prehistoric as a DC-8 had computers. OK, they were analogue and full of barometric capsules, cogs and springs, but computers they were all the same.
In the DC-8, you did
not control jet engine thrust with a simple 'fuel valve' connected by bits of wire to your ego, you moved a throttle lever which made an input demand to a fuel flow regulator.
It then worked out how much fuel to supply to the combustion chambers.
Neither did you 'measure' or even 'calculate' height. Or did the ancient old DC-8 have a pitot pressure indicator and a static pressure indicator - and the heroes of the day subtracted one from the other, then did some sums on the cockpit abacus to work out altitude, then applied a pressure datum to establish height? Somehow I doubt it....
There is so much nonsense in this thread from dinosaurs, play station kids, 172 heroes and others ignorant of the situation; sorting intelligent contribution from garbage is becoming frankly tedious.