Originally Posted by
DozyWannabe
[* - Did you ever hear Buzz Aldrin complaining that he couldn't feel what Neil Armstrong was doing on his sidestick? I'd like to hear some of the naysayers try to relegate those guys to "systems operators"
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Actually, from what I remember that is pretty much what they were for the lunar landing; Aldrin's job in particular was primarily to monitor the computer and other systems while Armstrong concentrated on landing safely. I believe true manual control of the LEM was tried and found to be impossible due to lag between control input and response; the 'manual' mode as implemented basically gave the crew the ability to select a point on the surface near the programmed landing site and tell the LEM computer to land there.
Aldrin could also tell exactly where Armstrong was aiming because the DSKY gave him that information. I believe it displayed an offset between the current flight path and the desired landing point, which could be matched up to surface features using a reticule on the window. Though for most of the approach he was probably too busy trying to debug the computer alarms to be able to look out of the window.
While this seems offtopic, it does actually have some similarities to what we seem to know of the AF447 crash as some people have suggested that Armstrong was so distracted by the computer errors that he wasn't monitoring the landing site properly during the approach and if they'd got unlucky that could have resulted in landing on bad terrain (e.g. on top of a rock or on the side of a small crater) or an abort. Computer failures overloading human pilots seems to have been a problem for quite a while.