Interesting reading Tonic's post about sitting in the right hand seat of an empty A340 and holding the stick, imagining what it would be like doing the same thing with 300 people aboard.
I did much the same thing in a Maersk 737 a couple of years back on the ground in Milan whilst tagging along for a j/s ride with a friendly Captain. I too sat there with my feet on the rudder pedals, hands gripped round the yoke trying to compare this beast with the Tomahawk that I'd grown used to. I couldn't even begin to imagine how exhilarating it would be like to speed down the tarmac at the helm of this thing.
But that said, when I was 15 I sat in the corner of a darkened radio studio in Liverpool, watching one of my then idols crafting together a live late night radio show. As a spotty wannabe radio presenter I looked on in amazement as my chap handled it all brilliantly, calmly talking away on air whilst cueing up a CD in his left ear, keeping an eye on the phone switchboard, and linking it all together seamlessly, totally unfazed by the thousands of listeners at the other end of the microphone.
After about hour to my utter delight he went off to the lav and asked me to 'segue' two songs together with a jingle, and disappeared out of the studio door. I nervously slid into 'the seat', surrounded by all these knobs and buttons, not knowing what any of them did, the fate of the radio station in my hands for the next four minutes. As I sat there waiting for the CD to come to an end, as I tried to compare that huge, technically complex studio to the little hospital radio mixer that I normally sat behind every weekend... That precise feeling returned to me totally in the flight deck of a 737 in Milan some 10 years later.
But now I sit in the radio hotseat everyday, and at this moment as I get Will Young's new song on and play some more ads for the Debenhams Sale, having dragged myself out of bed at half five when everyone else is fast asleep I am distinctly unfazed at sitting in the seat. I know what all the buttons do and I've spent many hundreds of hours with the same view of knobs, meters, flashing lights, CD countdowns and the like.
Perhaps being a professional pilot is much like my own job - an old boss once summed it up perfectly....a passion turned into an obligation...
Wise words indeed.