I am an aircraft engineer with nearly two decades of experience in the industry. I am not a pilot. What I find SHOCKING is that many professional pilots in this thread disagree so strongly on such basic issues as flight dynamics or what a variation of throttle will do to you in level flight. This is really scary. I know quite a lot about airframe design as well as flight control system design having done both for many years. But this thread is proving that as automation proceeds flying IS going to become more and more dangerous. And if that were not enough, they've now started to make airplanes from plastic!